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?

"With mobile payments adoption on the rise, merchants are searching for new ways to keep customers coming back," said Tony Rose, director of mobile product management at Vantiv. "One way merchants can increase brand loyalty is with offers such as mobile coupons and loyalty programs, but most merchants don't know how to use these programs because they don't know their customers' preferences. We believe merchants would best be served to invest in new technology such as putting smart targeted offers and coupons into mobile wallets where they are organized and transmitted automatically, offering not only environmental benefit but a much more convenient consumer experience." Not only are younger generations leading the charge for alternative ways to redeem offers, Millennials and Gen Xers are also the most likely to share promotions with their family and friends, especially through social media. The ShopTalk survey shows Millennials and Gen Xers (43 percent) are more likely than Boomers (12 percent) or Retirees (three percent) to share promotions through Facebook.

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.

Sundown AI announces their recent integration of Chloe, an Artificial Intelligence platform, with Magento, Inc. a worldwide leader in cloud digital commerce innovations. Chloe enhances mobile commerce by providing a voice powered interface for Magento Online Stores. Chloe AI can be found in the Magento marketplace: https://marketplace.magento.com/sundownai-chloe.html With Chloe, Magento website visitors now have the ability to get immediate assistance to their product or service questions directly from their smartphones while navigating through a Magento store. While explaining how Chloe works is useful, a Chloe mobile demo is even better: https://youtu.be/9hsCAfTqIHs Chloe uses proprietary technology to automatically process a company's customer service data and identify the policies that will guide her behavior.

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.

The idea of cross-validation is to split the data into N subsets, to put one subset aside, to estimate parameters of the model from the remaining N-1 subsets, and to use the retained subset to estimate the error of the model. Such a process is repeated N times - with each of the N subsets being used as the validation set . Then the values of the errors obtained in such N steps are combined to provide the final estimate of the model error. The cross-validation is used in various classification and prediction procedures, such as regression analysis, discriminant analysis, neural networks and classification and regression trees (CART) . The goal is to improve the quality of the decision that is made from the outcome of the study on the basis of statistical methods, and to ensure that maximum information is obtained from scarce experimental data.

Intel has unveiled its Shooting Star quadcopter drone, designed exclusively for light shows. The company, which put its own drone swarms in the air around the world in 2015, has come out with another model -- one with a software that will help a drone create an intended image. The software will even choose drones based on GPS reception quality and remaining battery life. This drone could help design elaborate light shows in a shorter duration. "With this drone, we will be able to demonstrate that drone light shows can redefine entertainment and create amazing new experiences in the night sky. " Anil Nanduri, vice president, new technology group, and general manager UAV segment, Intel Corporation, said in the official press release.

SoftBank also sells the Pepper human-shaped companion robot for homes and businesses, and runs a solar energy business in Japan, highlighting a critical stance against nuclear energy that has spread since the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Its investment empire encompasses financial technology and ride-booking services.

Today's developers often hear about leveraging machine learning algorithms in order to build more intelligent applications, but many don't know where to start. One of the most important aspects of developing smart applications is to understand the underlying machine learning models, even if you aren't the person building them. Whether you are integrating a recommendation system into your app or building a chat bot, this guide will help you get started in understanding the basics of machine learning. This introduction to machine learning and list of resources is adapted from my October 2016 talk at ACT-W, a women's tech conference. While this is only a brief definition, machine learning means we can use statistical models and probabilistic algorithms to answer questions so we can make informative decisions based on our data.

Brain regions within the core default network subsystem (DNCORE) that are more active during task-unrelated thought than during task-related thought (credit: Kalina Christoff et al./Nature Reviews Neuroscience) In a review of neuroscience literature from more than 200 journals, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a University of British Columbia-led team has proposed a radical new framework for understanding "mind wandering" and mental illness. Within this framework, spontaneous thought processes -- including mind-wandering, creative thinking, and dreaming -- arise when thoughts are relatively free from deliberate and automatic constraints. Mind-wandering is not far from creative thinking. "We propose that mind-wandering isn't an odd quirk of the mind," said Kalina Christoff, Ph.D., the review's lead author and a professor of psychology at UBC. "Rather, it's something that the mind does when it enters into a spontaneous mode. Without this spontaneous mode, we couldn't do things like dream or think creatively."