Ever wanted a way to easily extract and analyze meaningful data from text? The new Cloud Natural Language API has a feature that lets you extract entities from text -- like people, places and events -- with a single API call. Let's take the following sentence from a recent news article: LONDON -- J. K. Rowling always said that the seventh Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," would be the last in the series, and so far she has kept to her word. I could write my own algorithm to find the people and locations mentioned in this sentence, but that would be difficult. And it would be even more difficult if I wanted to gather more data on each of the mentioned entities, or analyze entities across thousands of sentences, while accounting for mentions of the same entity that are phrased differently (e.g., "Rowling" and "J.K. Rowling"). With Cloud Natural Language API, I can analyze the above sentence with the API's analyzeEntities method.

From smartphone assistants to image recognition and translation, machine learning already helps us in our everyday lives. But it can also help us to tackle some of the world's most challenging physical problems -- such as energy consumption. Large-scale commercial and industrial systems like data centers consume a lot of energy, and while much has been done to stem the growth of energy use, there remains a lot more to do given the world's increasing need for computing power. Google is taking many steps to reduce energy consumptions . Compared to five years ago, Google now get around 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy.

It's fair to say that Google-owned AI company DeepMind's big push into the health space via data-access collaborations with the UK's National Health Service -- announced with much fanfare in February this year -- has not been running entirely smoothly so far. But there are more regulatory bumps in the road ahead for DeepMind Health. TechCrunch has learned the company won't continue using one of the apps it co-designed with the NHS until the software has been registered as a medical device with the relevant regulatory body, the MHRA. That's especially interesting given that this app, called Streams, has already been used for patient care in multiple NHS hospitals. The Royal Free NHS Trust previously told TechCrunch the app had been used by up to six of its clinicians in three "user tests" in its London hospitals. Which, put another way, means a profit-driven commercial entity has been involved in a real-world test of an unregistered medical device on actual hospital patients.

Google is putting DeepMind's machine learning to work on managing their sprawling data centers' energy usage, and it's is performing like a boss -- the company reports a 15% drop in consumption since the AI took over. Google is undeniably a huge part of western civilization. The company's data servers pretty much handle all of my mail at this point, along with YouTube, social media platforms and much more. But even so, it's easy to forget that the Google we know and interact with every day is just the tip of the iceberg; it relies on huge data servers to process, transfer and store information -- and all this hardware needs a lot of power. So much power, in fact, that the company decided to do something about it.

In what the top-tier Danish law firm says is its first step to full implementation of an artificial intelligence solution, Bech-Bruun has selected both RAVN Connect Enterprise and RAVN Manage for advanced enterprise search and knowledge management. RAVN Connect Enterprise is RAVN System's next gen enterprise search solution, released in April 2014, which enables firms to find, manage and collaborate on their knowledge and expertise. Features include tagging, linking, voting and grading as well as a knowledge graph that highlights the relationship between knowledge and people. RAVN Manage monitors the health of its enterprise applications and exposes any hidden problems. Bech-Bruun, which with over 500 staff is one of the largest in the Nordic region, is using the RAVN Connect Enterprise search platform to search a wide variety of internal content including iManage Work, InterAction CRM, Navision and Mimecast.

While the idea of Tesla car-sharing seems new, it is not the first time the company's cars, coupled with autonomous technology, have come up in discussions about the sharing economy. Back in 2015, Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Uber investor DFJ, told an audience that Uber's Travis Kalanick had indicated he would buy every Tesla car produced if they could be made autonomous by 2020. These were the days when it appeared a Uber and Tesla partnership could be on the horizon. Musk himself paused long enough on an earnings call to raise suspicions when discussing the possibility of such a partnership. These days, it seems that Uber has gone its own way in developing an autonomous car solution.

Next month Las Vegas will host the Final Event of the DARPA Cyber grand Challenge as an all-computer cyber-defence Capture the Flag tournament. From an initial field of over 100 applicant seven teams will compete for the 3.5 million prize pool. As we reported at the time, DARPA announced this contest in October 2013. "to vastly improve the speed and effectiveness of IT security against escalating cyber threats." These AI systems would be designed to compete in CTF (Capture the Flag) contests, speed-driven bug hunting tournaments where experts reverse-engineer software, probe its weaknesses, search for deeply hidden flaws and create securely patched replacements.

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it – or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software – or bots – is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes. Bots are now undertaking much of the drudgery of business life – filling in forms, answering customer queries, compiling data and handling social media tasks. Proponents say this liberates staff to work on more creative and engaging work; bots are a new, cheap resource to be exploited. But is there a human cost and just how much should we expect from these new minion workers?

Every field of scientific study has its own holy grail. For particle physicists, it's the quest for physics beyond the Standard Model; for astrophysicists, it is the hunt for the elusive dark matter and dark energy; and for neuroscientists, it is explaining how inanimate matter becomes conscious. Obviously, the first step in understanding the mysteries of consciousness would be to map the tool through which it manifests itself -- the brain. On Wednesday, a team of neuroscientists released an extremely detailed map of terra incognita of the human brain -- the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is the brain's outermost layer and is responsible for sensory perception, language, attention, tool use and abstract thinking.

SoftBank Group Corp.'s former Chief Operating Officer Nikesh Arora, whose 8 billion package topped the list, hails from India. Higher wages in Japan were typically earned by sticking around, thanks to rigid corporate promotion systems based on tenure. In the U.S., executives have reaped the benefits of a shift from cash to equity-based compensation tied to their companies' performance -- a change that sent pay packages spiraling in recent decades as the stock market soared. Interlocking stock ownership between companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange fell to 16 percent in 2015 from 50 percent in 1990, according to data from Nomura Holdings Inc. Last year's biggest pay packages for Japan executives born in the country were Fanuc Corp. CEO Yoshiharu Inaba's 690 million and Sony Corp. CEO Kazuo Hirai's 513 million, data compiled by Bloomberg show.