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.

SoftBank said its robotics unit Cocoro SB, which is researching cloud-based artificial intelligence, will work with Honda on research that seeks to harmonize mobility with people, so that drivers can feel a kind of friendship with their vehicles.

Google Cloud Speech API enables developers to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy to use API. The API recognizes over 80 languages and variants, to support your global user base. You can transcribe the text of users dictating to an application's microphone, enable command-and-control through voice, or transcribe audio files, among many other use cases. Recognize audio uploaded in the request, and integrate with your audio storage on Google Cloud Storage, by using the same technology Google uses to power its own products.

Google is using a powerful new machine-learning approach to save huge amounts of energy (and hundreds of millions of dollars) each year at its vast data centers. It might not be long before the technique, which involves a machine-learning algorithm gradually learning to perfect a task with positive reinforcement, catches on in a range of other areas. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, a subsidiary based in the U.K. that is focused on artificial intelligence, said at a conference recently that Google was using techniques developed by his company to improve the energy efficiency of its data centers. Because Google spends so much on electricity for the buildings that house its massive server farms, a savings of just a few percent equals hundreds of millions of dollars per year. DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 for around 600 million, has shown how large artificial neural networks combined with reinforcement learning can train computers to perform complex tasks incredibly well.

Researchers used a combination of three imaging techniques and a machine learning system to create this new map of the brain, which includes 180 distinct regions in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex (the brain's outermost region). The different colors relate to how connected an area is to a specific sensory input: Red is hearing, green is touch, and blue is vision. Mixed colors represent areas where two senses overlap. A group of researchers have developed a new map of the cerebral cortex of the human brain, revealing 100 new distinct regions in each hemisphere. Representing the most detailed map of the brain yet, it's an achievement of a longstanding goal, and researchers say it will provide a crucial tool to understand how differences in even extremely small brain regions relate to behavior and disease.

When Amazon Echo with Alexa service came out in November 2014 I was skeptical. A speaker with voice recognition seemed like an unnecessary oddity. When a friend of mine purchased one in 2015, I had a chance to play with it but was unimpressed still. Alexa's SDK has been open to third party developers for a year now. As a software engineer it is important for me to keep up with emerging technologies and learn about them.