The most entertaining video we posted on Video Friday a couple weeks ago was almost certainly Robot Drone Man, a parody of this PPAP (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) video, which for some reason has 150 million views on YouTube. Parody or not, Robot Drone Man actually exists, and it's a project of Ilhan Bae, a researcher and futurist at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), who wrote in to tell us about it. Robot Drone Man is an avatar drone, in the same category as other telepresence robots like Double and Beam. It allows a remote human to have an embodied physical presence through a mobile robot, although in this case, the robot can fly, since most of it is a DJI S1000 octocopter. With a height of 1.4 meters (landed), it's designed to match the eye level of people interacting with it, and the remote operator can "gesticulate with two hands and head as if a distant operator exists in person," says Bae, adding that this is "the first trial to couple a telepresence robot in an upright position and drone platform into one body."

An Australian man acquitted of murder last month after his Tinder date plummeted off a balcony to her death faced new criticism after he acknowledged in a TV interview that the woman had screamed "no" a reported 33 times before she fell. "Yeah, she was certainly trying to make a lot of noise," Gable Tostee commented in the interview, which aired on the Nine Network's "60 Minutes." Critics also lashed out after The Courier Mail claimed Tostee was paid a six-figure sum for the interview. A senior detective called it "disgusting". The detective continued, "There's a lot of anger among police about this. Of course we respect the court's decision to find him not guilty but for him to now do a paid interview after everything this poor girl's family has been through, is horrific."

More recent deep lipreading approaches are end-to-end trainable (Wand et al., 2016; Chung & Zisserman, 2016a). All existing works, however, perform only word classification, not sentence-level sequence prediction. Studies have shown that human lipreading performance increases for longer words (Easton & Basala, 1982), indicating the importance of features capturing temporal context in an ambiguous communication channel. Motivated by this observation, we present LipNet, a model that maps a variable-length sequence of video frames to text, making use of spatiotemporal convolutions, an LSTM recurrent network, and the connectionist temporal classification loss, trained entirely end-to-end. To the best of our knowledge, LipNet is the first lipreading model to operate at sentence-level, using a single end-to-end speaker-independent deep model to simultaneously learn spatiotemporal visual features and a sequence model. On the GRID corpus, LipNet achieves 93.4% accuracy, outperforming experienced human lipreaders and the previous 79.6% state-of-the-art accuracy.

Media reports say an artificial intelligence (AI) system called MogIA, developed by Sanjiv Rai, an innovator based in Mumbai, has predicted that Donald Trump will win Tuesday's presidential elections in the United States. Unveiled in 2004, the system apparently got it right in the last three presidential elections. It also predicted that Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Rai is quoted as saying that the algorithm got even better as it has "learnt" from the last few rounds. MogIA is named after Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

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.