Screen time and how to control it has replaced homework and healthy eating as a parent's main concern, according to charity Action for Children. Medical and addiction experts and parents told the Observer on Sunday that they are becoming increasingly worried about the amount of time children spend playing online games such as League of Legends, World of Warcraft and Minecraft. But they also talk of positives in terms of educational benefits, socialisation and escapism that games offer. If you are a parent who has concerns over their child's gaming and screen time, we'd like to hear from you. Do you think gaming sessions have become an addiction?

I define creativity as the association between two ideas that one would not ordinarily consider a reasonable one to make but that works. I think that this is a rather simple thing to do for computers. I've been working on writing novels computationally for well over 10 years now and I'm still trying it, although I believe that within the next two to three years I will have broken its back and will produce 100,000-word novels in half an hour or so, novels that I think most people would consider to be creative. I can do uncreative short stories at this point, ones where the associations are routine and expected; they have occurred in many thousands of previous books. But I believe that in the near future my programs will be able to do creative ones. We are used to machines being used as tools that do not have a high level of cognitive ability, so it's difficult for people to think of them as being able to exhibit truly creative behaviour.

In a deep learning representation of human disease, lower layers could represent clinical measurements (such as ECG data or protein biomarkers), intermediate layers could represent aberrant pathways (which may simultaneously impact many biomarkers), and top layers could represent disease subclasses (which arise from the variable contributions of 1 aberrant pathways). Ideally, such subclasses would do more than stratify by risk and would actually reflect the dominant disease mechanism(s). This raises a question about the underlying pathophysiologic basis of complex disease in any given individual: is it sparsely encoded in a limited set of aberrant pathways, which could be recovered by an unsupervised learning process (albeit with the right features collected and a large enough sample size), or is it a diffuse, multifactorial process with hundreds of small determinants combining in a highly variable way in different individuals? In the latter case, the concept of precision medicine is unlikely to be of much utility. However, in the former situation, unsupervised and perhaps deep learning might actually realize the elusive goal of reclassifying patients according to more homogenous subgroups, with shared pathophysiology, and the potential of shared response to therapy.

Researchers from Princeton University received mass media attention when they recently predicted the demise of Facebook. Data scientists at Facebook soon hit back with their own'study:' "In keeping with the scientific principle (used by Princeton) 'correlation equals causation,' our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely." Is it surprising that the original Princeton study found its way onto the front pages of newspapers and magazines across the world? Probably not – the fact is statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. What the data scientists at Princeton relied upon in presenting their paper was our individual human inability to think statistically.

An upcoming TV interview with the Australian man acquitted of the murder of a New Zealand woman during a Tinder date has met with an online backlash. Gable Tostee, 30, was charged after Warriena Wright, 26, fell in 2014 from his balcony in Queensland's Gold Coast. After a high-profile, week-long trial last month, a jury found him not guilty of murder and manslaughter. The Nine Network's 60 Minutes programme has arranged the exclusive interview which will air on 13 November. "I restrained her to stop her from attacking me," Mr Tostee said in a preview of the interview.

One of Blizzard Entertainment's hottest video games is making the jump into a professional sports league. The studio, a division of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, announced Friday the launch of Overwatch League, a professional video gaming league kicking off its inaugural season during the second half of 2017. Details of the league were revealed during Blizzcon, the studio's annual fan event in Anaheim, Calif. Blizzard says the league will combine competitive video gaming -- better known as eSports -- with hallmarks of professional sports leagues like the National Football League, complete with teams based in various cities worldwide featuring owners who will cultivate team and player development. "Nothing like this has ever really been done before," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick during an interview with USA TODAY.

Criteo is organizing the Machine Learning in the Real World workshop. This workshop aims at bringing together people from the industry and from academia to better understand which machine learning algorithms are used in practice and what we can do to improve them. Anyone who is involved in applying machine learning on real world data is welcome. This event is primarily intended for people with technical fluency in machine learning to help each other advance the state of the art. If you are interested in learning about the basics of the field, there are plenty of other great events in Paris which are probably more appropriate.

What Did You Miss at the Deep Learning Summit Last Week?

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. EB: What are the most important examples of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream society today? MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible.

Artificial intelligence has become the pet anxiety of luminaries like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking. They have all expressed concerns about our Promethean quest to develop machine intelligence, and those concerns seem to be spreading every day. But there's another dimension of technological change that ought to worry us every bit as much as AI, if not more so. Bioengineering has already allowed human beings to take control of their own evolution. Whether it's emergent cloning technologies or advanced gene therapy, we're quickly approaching a world in which humans can -- and will -- change the way they live and die. Michael Bess is a historian of science at Vanderbilt University and the author of a fascinating new book, Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in a Bioengineered Society. Bess's book offers a sweeping look at our genetically modified future, a future as terrifying as it is promising. "We're going to give ourselves a power that we may not have the wisdom to control very well," he told me.