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.

Let our Chatbot help--type your question above to explore AI topics. Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can't easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1--it's already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations. Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion.

Seven years after Google started developing robocars, 13 months after a Florida man died in a Tesla Model S that was driving itself, and almost a year after self-driving Ubers started picking up passengers in Pennsylvania, Congress might actually start regulating autonomous vehicles. Nearly everyone working on this emerging technology, from automakers to the tech companies to the government watchdogs, agrees that it's about time. The robocars scurrying about places like Austin and Boston and San Francisco operate under a mélange of state and local rules that lay down different requirements and appease myriad special interests. And if this patchwork persists, bringing these cars to the market could be a major headache. Last week, the Senate published bipartisan principles outlining what the legislation might look like.

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 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.

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.

Fundamentally the assumption here is will the EU actually lead any of the 4th Industrial innovation and will the UK be worse off for Brexit? Historically the EU has struggled to create competitors to Amazon, Google and new innovations are typically international in nature. Recent research on these issues of coordinated multiple countries agendas has proved burdensome and inefficient but I remain hopeful as a principle a cross boarder EU strategy can work as collectively it is the worlds largest market; but that said in practice is highly fragmented and national centric. The H2020 80 Billion Euro fund available till 2020 is one such issue that post Brexit period may see UK research move east and west as we seek other funding partners. The UK foundations where already well built, in some cases a millennia ago, in the academic and research traditions long before the 1973 membership.

The Los Angeles Fire Department could soon seek federal permission to fly drones, a tool that officials say could help them track down missing hikers, gauge the risks in burning buildings and search confined spaces. A Los Angeles City Council committee voted Tuesday to allow the department to start seeking Federal Aviation Administration authorization to use "unmanned aerial systems," despite objections from groups concerned about privacy rights. That decision now heads to the entire council for approval. "I think there's a tremendous opportunity to save lives," said Councilman Mitch Englander, who has championed the idea. Fire officials say no drones will be launched, however, until the Board of Fire Commissioners and the City Council approve a policy outlining how they can be used.