In lieu of a traditional orientation--we're not much for HR anyway--we think it would be more effective to outline the many, many ways in which you are screwed. After all, garbage fires don't put out themselves! For starters, you're going to need to fill a few executive-level roles. It's not as existential a problem as the toxic corporate culture and subsequent comeuppance that led to those departures in the first place, but good to score some small victories. As of now you'll just need a COO, a CFO, a CTO, a president of ride-sharing, and a general counsel.

Bots and trolls are working together to spread propaganda and manipulate Twitter and Facebook users' political views, says a new study from the University of Oxford. Bots "played a small but strategic role" in shaping Twitter conversations during the EU referendum last year, according to the report. "The family of hashtags associated with the argument for leaving the EU dominated, while less than one percent of sampled accounts generated almost a third of all the messages," it says. They also affected the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the study adds. "Computational propaganda is one of the most powerful new tools against democracy," warns the report.

Yoshua Bengio has never been one to take sides. As one of the three intellects who shaped the deep learning that now dominates artificial intelligence, he has been catapulted to stardom. It's a field so new the people who can advance it fit into one room together, and everyone--from tech startups to multinational conglomerates and the department of defense--wants a share of their minds. But while his peer scientists Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton have signed on to Facebook and Google, respectively, Bengio, 53, has chosen to continue working from his small third-floor office on the hilltop campus of the University of Montreal. "I want to remain a neutral agent," he says as he sips rust-colored licorice water, which he pours from a carafe that acts as a weight for the mess of papers cluttering his desk. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter. Like the nuclear scientists of the last century, Bengio understands that the tools he's invented are powerful beyond measure and must be cultivated with great forethought and widespread consideration. "We don't want one or two companies, which I will not name, to be the only big players in town for AI," he says, raising his eyebrows to indicate that we both know which companies he means. One eyebrow is in Menlo Park; the other is in Mountain View. That's why Bengio has recently chosen to forego his neutrality, signing on with Microsoft.

The exploded skull of a man who died in the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago has been pieced together giving scientists a unique opportunity to capture the ancient face using 3D imaging. It is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum. The appearance is that of a typical southern European who may have been wealthy and educated because he was 50 years old when he died - an unusual milestone for the time. He was one of 350 casualties discovered frozen in time, buried under volcanic ash in Herculaneum. This is the first real-life reconstruction of the features of a victim of the volcanic disaster who lived in the ill-fated seaside town of Herculaneum.

The US military says it has shot down an armed, Iran-made drone that had been bearing down on its forces near a garrison in Syria's southeast. In the latest sign of increasingly frequent confrontation with Damascus and its allies, Tuesday's incident closely followed Sunday's US downing of a piloted Syrian army jet in the southern Raqqa countryside after it dropped bombs near US-backed forces. The Pentagon said a US F-15 aircraft, flying over Syrian territory, fired on the drone after it displayed hostile intent and advanced on coalition forces. Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said it had "dirty wings", meaning it was armed. "I can tell you it was an Iranian-made drone," Davis said, declining to speculate on who was operating it.

RoboCup is an international scientific initiative with the goal to advance the state of the art of intelligent robots. Established in 1997, the original mission was to field a team of robots capable of winning against the human soccer World Cup champions by 2050. To celebrate 20 years of RoboCup, the Federation is launching a video series featuring each of the leagues with one short video for those who just want a taster, and one long video for the full story. Robohub will be featuring one league every week leading up to RoboCup 2017 in Nagoya, Japan. In our final set of videos, we are featuring the RoboCupJunior league!

The man who volunteered to be a human guinea pig by undertaking the world's first head transplant this year has admitted his dream will never happen. Severely handicapped Russian Valery Spiridonov, 31, now accepts his hopes of his head being grafted onto a new healthy body are over. Controversial pioneering neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero - dubbed Dr Frankenstein - has vowed to undertake the first such transplant in China with an as yet unnamed local patient undergoing the operation. Valery Spiridonov, 31, who suffers from a muscle-wasting disease and had volunteered to undergo the world's first head transplant, says the operation will not go ahead As preparation the Turin-based medic was recently part of a team that attached a new head to a rat. But Spiridonov - who worked with Professor Canavero for two years and became the human face of hopes for head transplant surgery - acknowledged he had now lost his hopes a new body free from disabilities.

You might want to start off by writing a resume by hand and using your hanko (personal seal) to prove its authenticity. If you actually get hired, you may need to get used to faxing documents to clients. Japan enjoys a reputation as being home to high-tech gadgets and advanced robotics. But if you look more closely into corporate culture, offices remain bound to old-fashioned, paper-based customs. "Going digital is a global trend in such places as the United States and Europe," said Hayato Koeda, president of electronic signature service DocuSign Japan K.K. "If Japan continues to stick to traditional practices based on paper and hanko, I think it won't be able to do business internationally."

The move was the second time in a week that it shot down a pro-Syrian government aircraft in the sky. "The armed pro-regime Shaheed-129 UAV was shot down by a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle at approximately 12:30 a.m. Carla Babb, the Pentagon correspondent for Voice of America (VOA) tweeted Tuesday saying the sources have confirmed that the Iranian-made drone shot down by the U.S. fighter jet was being operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said the U.S. military shot down the Shahed 129 as it approached an established coalition combat outpost near al-Tanf in southeast Syria, where the U.S. is holding training sessions for local fighters against the Islamic State group, VOA reported. Officials also said that the shot Iranian aircraft was the same type of drone that a U.S. warplane had shot down June 8 after it attacked U.S.-backed fighters in southern Syria.

Ellie, an AI therapist who thrives deep in the hearts of University of Southern California's (USC) computers, can treat people with depression and veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, she has been ranked higher than human therapists in eliciting personal information from patients. Born out of DARPA's funding, Ellie was designed as part of a virtual reality (VR) programme named SimSensei. Ellie is still in the research stage, but USC researchers say her reach will be greatly expanded in the future. Ellie will soon interview cancer patients about the difficulties they face with their illnesses and separately consult veterans about their traumas.