Legal research company Casetext has raised $12 million in a new round of funding. The money will be used to expand its software platform that offers insights into cases cited in legal documents and further develop CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant), an AI-powered assistant for lawyers. Using natural language understanding, Casetext scans the text of legal briefs to locate and analyze case citations. The company also offers access to 10 million court cases and statutes annotated by a community of litigators. The $12 million funding round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, 8VC, and Red Sea Ventures.

It is not every day that young Saudis wander down the street dressed as the Hulk or Doctor Doom. But for three days over the weekend, some 20,000 Saudis decked out in costumes and face paint queued to get into the kingdom's first-ever Comic Con, where robots, video games and giant anime figures filled a tent in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. The global comics expo was held under the auspices of the Saudi General Entertainment Authority, which has hosted a series of festivals, comedy shows and concerts this year. Saudi Arabia is trying to boost its entertainment sector as part of an economic and social reform drive aimed at creating jobs and weaning the country off its dependence on oil. "The level of entertainment has risen so much from previous years. There used to be no public places like this for families, there was no gender mixing, there was no entertainment, there were no shows," said Modah Al-Bakheet, a Jeddah resident.

Developed so far, multi-document summarization has reached its bottleneck due to the lack of sufficient training data and diverse categories of documents. Text classification just makes up for these deficiencies. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization system called TCSum, which leverages plentiful text classification data to improve the performance of multi-document summarization. TCSum projects documents onto distributed representations which act as a bridge between text classification and summarization. It also utilizes the classification results to produce summaries of different styles. Extensive experiments on DUC generic multi-document summarization datasets show that, TCSum can achieve the state-of-the-art performance without using any hand-crafted features and has the capability to catch the variations of summary styles with respect to different text categories.

WASHINGTON/SANAA/DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – The U.S. military said Thursday it is investigating last weekend's raid by U.S. special operations forces in Yemen and that innocent civilians, including children, were apparently killed. U.S. Central Command said civilians may have been hit by gunfire from aircraft called in to assist U.S. troops, who engaged in a ferocious firefight with militants from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group's Yemen affiliate. The military said the civilians may not have been visible to the U.S. forces because they were mixed in with combatants who were firing at U.S. troops "from all sides to include houses and other buildings." Nasser al-Awlaki told The Associated Press that among the children killed was his 8-year-old granddaughter Anwaar, an American citizen. Her father was Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols -- lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish -- and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date. Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols -- lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish -- and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals, assumed the artifact wasn't Indian at all but some misplaced foreign token. The stone, along with similar ones found over the next few years, ended up in the British Museum. In the 1920s many more of these artifacts, by then known as seals, were found and identified as evidence of a 4,000-year-old culture now known as the Indus Valley Civilization, the oldest known Indian civilization to date. Since then, thousands more of these tiny seals have been uncovered.

SANAA/ADEN – Suspected U.S. drone strikes have killed three alleged al-Qaida operatives in Yemen's southwestern Bayda province, security and tribal officials said, the first such killings reported in the country since Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency Friday. The two Saturday strikes killed Abu Anis al-Abi, an area field commander, and two others, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release the information to journalists. U.S. drone strikes against suspected al-Qaida targets have been commonplace in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, as a retaliatory measure against the group. The use of unmanned aircraft as well as airstrikes in the Arab world's poorest country rose dramatically under President Barack Obama, with data from the Britain-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism showing spikes in attacks, especially in 2012 and 2016. On Thursday, U.S. intelligence officials said as many as 117 civilians had been killed in drone and other counterterror attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere during Obama's presidency.

A U.S. Air Force pilot grasps a flight control and weapons firing stick while preparing to launch a MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), from a ground control station in the Persian Gulf region on January 7, 2016. At 12:01 p.m. on January 20th, drone geek Maynard Holliday won't be a Pentagon robot expert anymore. One of the roughly 4,000 Obama appointees out of a job on Friday, Holliday is wrapping up two and a half years of work designing and buying drones for the Pentagon. A self-proclaimed Star Trek-loving science nerd who grew up obsessed with the thought of one day traveling into space himself, today Holliday's much more interested in a smaller kind of'space race' happening here on Planet Earth. As he shuffles his way out of Washington, he says he's got one big worry about the future of military drone warfare: What happens when and if killer drones go on autopilot?

As the US war machine develops a digital air force of "unmanned aerial vehicles," it's only a matter of time before fighter planes without fighter jocks joust in some robot dogfight in the sky. "Tumbleweeds cleared" reads the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of the nature of local enterprise. This is the desert east of Palmdale, California, center of the US high-tech aerospace industry. To the north is Edwards Air Force Base and nearby, Air Force Plant 42, where Northrop hatched the B-2 bomber. A few hundred yards away is Lockheed Skunk Works, birthplace of the F-117 stealth fighter. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. But now I'm driving past old ranches with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, beneath a sky as wide as the plain, looking for a very different kind of airplane.

Twisted rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture lay scattered across the floor of this room. Our view through a jagged hole in the wall looks out on the city, showing steady civilian traffic crossing a bridge over a river below. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. An Army major beside me, Paul Tyrrell, scans the high-rises on the other side of the river through his laser rangefinder. He is the frontline eyes of the coalition, responsible for calling in air strikes. A platoon sergeant named Donald Prado tells Tyrrell that an office tower half a mile to the west is an enemy stronghold. Prado radios in for the Air Force to drop a smoke screen for cover.