How much time did you spend looking at your smartphone this weekend? In fact, recent research found that our constant smartphone use is having an effect on our kids. Don't worry because this roundup of last week's tech news will get you all caught up with plenty of time left to get outside and enjoy the summer sun. Your children will thank you for reading it. This week, we're talking about the latest round of fake accounts banned from Facebook (and what you can do about them), our increasingly complicated relationship with digital assistants, and whether or not ergonomic gadgets can actually fix the damage from years of sitting and staring at screens.

This is such an incomplete description of what Kaggle is! I believe that competitions (and their highly lucrative cash prizes) are not even the true gems of Kaggle. Take a look at their website's header-- All of these together have made Kaggle much more than simply a website that hosts competitions. It has, now, also become a complete project-based learning environment for data science. I will talk about that aspect of Kaggle in details after this section.

It's been more than a century since Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for illustrating the way neurons allow you to walk, talk, think, and be. In the intervening hundred years, modern neuroscience hasn't progressed that much in how it distinguishes one kind of neuron from another. Sure, the microscopes are better, but brain cells are still primarily defined by two labor-intensive characteristics: how they look and how they fire. Which is why neuroscientists around the world are rushing to adopt new, more nuanced ways to characterize neurons. Sequencing technologies, for one, can reveal how cells with the same exact DNA turn their genes on or off in unique ways--and these methods are beginning to reveal that the brain is a more diverse forest of bristling nodes and branching energies than even Ramón y Cajal could have imagined.

The best asset that anyone has actually--looking at work for the future--the best thing is the ability to learn. And the reason I say the ability to learn is that in the future, when you look at how fast technology is really [moving]--it's exploding. We have artificial intelligence, machine learning. These are algorithms that iterate on themselves. As things get smarter and faster and quicker, the reason our greatest asset is the ability to learn is that it's no longer about what we knew from the past or the degree we earned. All of these things that we're talking about are not found in books, and so this is why I say what's most important is your ability to learn because you're going to be in the moment, learning new things, and adjusting and being quite agile with what you might be doing. What your job title might be might change many, many times because, as technology shifts and changes, so do the roles that are available, and so does the creativity that we apply to it as a human being change, as well. SEE: IT Jobs in 2020: A Leader's Guide (ZDNet) Download as a PDF (TechRepublic) What I think is really unique about human learning versus, say, what artificial intelligence with their algorithms learns is that with human beings, what we're learning is we're learning how to apply what's uniquely human, and that's creativity. How do we apply this piece that artificial intelligence doesn't yet have, and I say yet because I do believe, in the future, artificial intelligence will also acquire the ability to be emotive, to express creativity because if you look at this, if we can teach a chatbot to mimic Shakespeare, then, over time, these algorithms will iterate enough times to actually crack the code on creativity. I believe that to be the future future, but before that time, we might as well capitalize on our greatest human gift, and that is our ability to create, to form from nothingness something truly unique and special and to solve problems with creativity versus, say, set rules.

I have been brewing the idea of using machine learning to improve software systems since 2016. It was pretty vague and broad, without an actionable plan. I just had the intuition -- the software configuration and tuning, especially after the adoption of microservices, was getting too complex. If you have enough experience in the software industry, then it's very likely that you've struggled with either a configuration problem or a tuning problem. Configuration and tuning problems are pretty common and can lead to really bad outages.

Last year, CNET traveled to San Marcos, California, for an early, behind-the-scenes look at a new generation of artificially intelligent sex robots from Abyss Creations, maker of the popular "RealDolls" line of customizable sex dolls. Now, customers can expect to start receiving those same sexbots within the next month. So says Abyss Creations founder and chief designer Matthew McMullen in a recent video interview with a RealDoll enthusiast and Harmony beta tester who goes by "Brick Dollbanger." In the interview, McMullen says fully equipped AI sex robots should start shipping in September, which matches what a spokesperson for Abyss Creations subsidiary Realbotix told me earlier this week. McMullen also said putting the final touches on his company's new creations has proven to be "a little more difficult than we anticipated."

Digital assistants like Amazon's Echo can listen to you. And they can talk back. But that doesn't mean they can carry on a good conversation. As the devices that run these assistants become more commonplace -- 39 million Americans now own one, according to a recent study -- Amazon and competitors like Apple and Google foresee a day when you can chat with their assistants as you would with a friend. After consulting with the companies involved and a few artificial intelligence experts we created tests that show what they can and can't handle.

Yuval Noah Harari was catapulted into the international literary spotlight in 2014 following the English translation of his book Sapiens. The book, which covers the history of humanity from the discovery of fire to modern robotics, became a non-fiction publishing phenomenon, feted by then-US President Barack Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and went on to sell more than eight million copies worldwide. In his next book, Homo Deus, the Israeli historian and author explored how the growth of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology could radically alter and divide human society, perhaps ending the species altogether. The same themes crop up again in his latest work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which collects essays, talks and responses to his readers in a series of observations on everything from meditation to climate change. In an interview with the Talk to Al Jazeera programme, Harari discussed technology, immigration and politics with Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett in Tel Aviv. Editor's note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a lot of promise, but it is still in the hype phase. Although strides have been made in machine learning and cognitive computing, most practical applications for AI are still nascent. As such, this is the right time to begin developing AI standards that can address some of the issues that have already been identified with AI, such as potential bias and the ethical concerns behind the technology, so that business value can be maximized. Syed Husain, Manager Enterprise Architecture for Accenture, examined these topics at The Open Group London event in April 2018. In this far-reaching conversation, we spoke with Husain about where AI stands today, what the ultimate promise of AI is and the value standards may be able to bring to this still-emerging technology. How do you define Artificial Intelligence?

This work compares user collaboration with conversational personal assistants vs. teams of expert chatbots. Two studies were performed to investigate whether each approach affects accomplishment of tasks and collaboration costs. Participants interacted with two equivalent financial advice chatbot systems, one composed of a single conversational adviser and the other based on a team of four experts chatbots. Results indicated that users had different forms of experiences but were equally able to achieve their goals. Contrary to the expected, there were evidences that in the teamwork situation that users were more able to predict agent behavior better and did not have an overhead to maintain common ground, indicating similar collaboration costs. The results point towards the feasibility of either of the two approaches for user collaboration with conversational agents.