Tech expert Kurt Knutsson examines the convergence of cutting-edge technology and traditional culture. In a stunning display of technological prowess and cultural fusion, Unitree's H1 humanoid robots recently stole the show at China's Spring Festival Gala, performing alongside human dancers in a mesmerizing rendition of the traditional Yangge folk dance. This groundbreaking performance marks a significant milestone in the world of robotics and entertainment. Get security alerts & expert tech tips--sign up for Kurt's The CyberGuy Report now The performance featured 16 H1 robots, each standing at an impressive 5.74 feet tall, seamlessly integrated with a troupe of human dancers. What set this performance apart was not just the robots' ability to keep pace with the music and their human counterparts but their mastery of a particularly challenging aspect of the Yangge dance: the handkerchief trick.

Join us! See the full lineup and purchase tickets. For the twenty-fourth year, the pages of The New Yorker will come to life for three days in New York City. The 2023 New Yorker Festival, hosted by the magazine's writers and editors, will take place October 6th through 8th, featuring onstage interviews, musical performances, live cartooning, and panels on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the craft of investigative journalism. Guests will include authors, artists, filmmakers, actors, comedians, and musicians, all sharing the distinction of being at the forefront of their fields. Subscribers to The New Yorker now have exclusive access to the twenty-four-hour ticket presale.

But Cannes has now been taken up a notch, with BMW debuting its luxurious new yacht at the 76th annual film festival. The new'Icon' boat took the French coast by storm today as it showcased a lavish yet emission-free form of travel. Beyond its slick glass exterior lies 360 rotating seats, a voice-controlled touchscreen and numerous other high-tech features fit for royalty. Even its sound system screams movie star glamour with an exclusive soundtrack by the Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer stowed inside. BMW debuted its zero-emission'Icon' yacht at the glamorous 76th Cannes Film Festival Amid its debut, the German car firm stressed that its prism-shaped boat'encapsulates a future-facing form of luxury', with designers across Los Angeles, Munich and Shanghai having worked on it.

Outside Somerset House this week, you might notice that two lampposts are blinking at each other. Unless you are fluent in Morse code, however, you probably won't clock that they are performing Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet. The installation by Geraint Edwards welcomes you to Now Play This, an experimental games festival, where you could also play a game about getting over a breakup by wielding a sword while riding a motorbike through a neon city, or listen to artist Laurence Young give a talk about getting his mother into the fantasy video game Elden Ring. Now Play This – now in its ninth year at Somerset House – can be relied upon to bring people together in unexpected ways. It has hosted everything from giant ball mazes to outdoor playground games and a game about chucking fascists out of your garden. But this year's theme, love, has created an especially open, even intimate atmosphere.

The AI and Music S T ARTS Festival, organised by Sónar, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and Betevé on 27-28 October comprised more than 100 activities that combined music and AI. The event gathered musicians, scientists and artists from across the world who gave exclusive live presentations of their work and experiments with AI. One of the main initiatives of the AI and Music S T ARTS Festival, and one which transcended the event, was the creation of Thinking Lab, an applied research lab where participants can explore the interrelation between AI and musical creativity, and, ultimately, the interaction between people and machines. The Thinking Lab is led by the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (IDEAI-UPC) and the Centre for Image and Multimedia Technology (CITM), both at UPC, and coordinated together with Sónar. In this space of debate and co-creation, which has been in place since April, scientists, artists and other professionals exchange experiences and knowledge that has contributed to some of the presentations and performances at the festival.

With increased applications of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial workplaces, behavioural effects of human-cobot interactions need to be further investigated. This is of particular importance as nonverbal behaviours of collaboration partners in human-robot teams significantly influence the experience of the human interaction partners and the success of the collaborative task. During the Ars Electronica 2020 Festival for Art, Technology and Society (Linz, Austria), we invited visitors to exploratively interact with an industrial robot, exhibiting restricted interaction capabilities: extending and retracting its arm, depending on the movements of the volunteer. The movements of the arm were pre-programmed and telecontrolled for safety reasons (which was not obvious to the participants). We recorded video data of these interactions and investigated general nonverbal behaviours of the humans interacting with the robot, as well as nonverbal behaviours of people in the audience. Our results showed that people were more interested in exploring the robot's action and perception capabilities than just reproducing the interaction game as introduced by the instructors. We also found that the majority of participants interacting with the robot approached it up to a distance which would be perceived as threatening or intimidating, if it were a human interaction partner. Regarding bystanders, we found examples where people made movements as if trying out variants of the current participant's behaviour.

Even though we do our best to bring you a solid 52 Video Fridays every year (which works out to over 1,000 robot videos annually), we can't manage to post everything, and sometimes, we miss out on some awesome stuff. That's just one of the reasons why we always look forward to the Robot Film Festival, and the 2018 event took place in July in Portland, Ore. I showed up and gave a talk (most of which you can see in this article), and then found a seat and watched the film selections. As always, there was an impressive amount of really, really good robot videos that I'd never seen before. The videos have all been posted online, and we've picked out a few of the happiest, saddest, scariest, and cleverest to share.

ZHENGZHOU, China - In Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station. In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival. In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor. With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people.

Security was greater than ever at the French festival, with stepped up efforts to restrict access and even an anti-drone system. France remains under a state of emergency since the November 2015 Paris attacks. This is also the first festival held since the nearby Nice attack last year that killed 86 people.