Now in its 30th year South by Southwest is synonymous with creativity and innovation for advertisers and marketers from around the world and this year has seen the program significantly expand with hundreds of new sessions catering to a record breaking 72,000 delegates across its interactive, music and film festivals. So beyond dizzying crowds, and the ever-present fear of missing out on the next big thing, what are some of the key trends to have emerged from the annual techie talkfest and what are the things which were hot in previous years but have now have lost their cool after going mainstream? Walking around Austin, VR is everywhere. Demand by festival goers to get their hands on the latest 360 experience has left people queuing day and night for their chance to play. Samsung, realising the round the clock queues their 5D sensory experience would attract, took things a step further with a tweet containing #VRonDemand summoning one of Austin's iconic hipster peddled pedicabs to your location wherever you were, taking the experience out of the showroom and into the streets. However, there was no sign of Microsoft's augmented reality visor the Hololens this year.

Beware this article may contain spoilers! Here is a list of AI movies you should definitely watch. I guess I first realised what AI meant when I was watching A.I. Artificial Intelligence: a small boy could technically be replaced by a robot, expressing his feelings, thinking and learning things like a real human. What struck me in the movie, was that no matter what the robot did to be like a real boy, it seemed to stop him from being accepted as a son. It seemed inevitable: Humans & AI could not coexist in the same Universe. This actually happened in a lot of movies like HER where Samantha can no longer stay within our human world and all the OSes need to go away in order to evolve.

I have been getting into Natural Language Processing more lately, and have been reading about tools and products that are available right now. I came across the name Narrative Science again. It's an Artificial Intelligence technology company based in Chicago. I first heard about them a few years ago when I read an article about one of their products writing pretty decent sports reports for local newspapers. I looked around their website to see if I can learn a bit more about their technology, but unsurprisingly they are very cagey about revealing anything actionable about their work.

And no sound bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, will bring them back to life." First written in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza, these words from Rafeef Ziadah's poem "We Teach Life, Sir" became popularised by a 2011 performance that went viral. A Palestinian performance poet based in London, Ziadah is an activist in her own right and a member of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee. She has helped spearhead many of the initiatives calling for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel until it adheres to the demands granting Palestinians rights under international law. The poem is now featured on Ziadah's latest album of the same name, which blends her poetry with original music composed by Phil Mansour. Al Jazeera spoke with Ziadah about her latest album, the inspiration and politics of her art, as well as her UK-based activism. Al Jazeera: Your poems were previously known for your captivating performance. Why did you decide to add music to your poems? Rafeef Ziadah: Both my first album "Hadeel" and this second one "We Teach Life" have been collaborations with wonderful musicians who deliberately worked to ensure the music strengthened and emphasised the words. With an album, unlike live performances, people are not able to see me and relate to my facial expressions or hand gestures - on the album we wanted to recreate that connection and music really helped to bring the poems to life. I was happy to work with activist-artist Phil Monsour (who produced the album). The music has also helped introduce the work to a broader audience and is beginning to have radio play on independent radio stations around the world. Al Jazeera: How long did it take you to make this album? Why have you decided to release it now and what do you hope will come out of its release? Ziadah: The album was a slow collaboration that started with a number of poetry pieces and slowly grew in number. It took about 12 months to complete the final production, but the poems were written over several years and recorded in a few countries depending on accessibility. It is really an attempt to capture in words a number of recent experiences of Palestinians inside historic Palestine and in exile as well. This work is also - in many ways- a collective effort beyond myself and the musicians because we launched a crowd funding campaign to support the final stages of production and many people generously donated to make sure narratives that are largely absent in the Western mainstream can be heard. As I explain in the album's artwork "the poems and music here have been written over several years, three wars, two sieges, too many borders and many protests and picket lines.

Lightroom users who sync their photos to the app's Web module can now test out a new and improved way to locate specific images: Search. As part of a new Lightroom Technology Preview series debuting today, Adobe is making the search feature available to Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscribers to test and offer feedback before finalizing it. As described in a blog post Friday morning, Search lets you type in a keyword to enable Lightroom to display all related images it finds in your library, even images you never tagged or labeled. Macworld got to test out the new feature early, and it worked quite nicely. Just log in to your account, and click on the Lr logo at the top left to access the menu. There, you'll find the new Technology Previews feature.

Gina Rodriguez as Jane and Brett Dier as Michael in the popular TV series Jane the Virgin, in which a shared online calendar was a plot point. Gina Rodriguez as Jane and Brett Dier as Michael in the popular TV series Jane the Virgin, in which a shared online calendar was a plot point. People in love have always savored their relationship milestones: the first date, the first I-love-you's, meeting each other's families. Modern relationships come with their own special milestones, like swapping Wi-Fi passwords, becoming Facebook official, taking down your online dating profiles, and increasingly often, choosing to share your online calendar. These days, more couples are discussing whether to make their online calendars visible to each other.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Science fiction authors love the robot sidekick. R2-D2, Commander Data, and KITT--just to name a few--defined "Star Wars," "Star Trek," and "Knight Rider," respectively, just as much as their human actors. While science has brought us many of the inventions dreamed of in sci-fi shows, one major human activity has remained low tech and a huge source of frustration: household chores.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly automated* Automaton bloggers. We'll be also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Mark your calendars: the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots" is in less than two weeks! Loyal readers of this blog will probably recognize all of the robots and most of the people in the trailer, but it looks like NOVA--which bills itself as "the most-watched primetime science series on television"--scored some great expert commentary along with footage of DRC robots that we've never seen before.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your stigmergic Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. "Academy Award -nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is the largest prize competition of all time with a reward of 30 million and aims to incentivize entrepreneurs to create a new era of affordable access to the Moon and beyond, while inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers." "DARPA's Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program seeks to provide innovative cross-pollination between fixed-wing and rotary-wing technologies and by developing and integrating novel subsystems to enable radical improvements in vertical and cruising flight capabilities.

Editors Note: This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here. Once upon a time there was a very odd British television show called The Prisoner, which featured a secret agent repeatedly attempting to escape from a mysterious village. One of the biggest threats the agent faced was a giant balloon called Rover, which would pursue and subdue rule-breaking villagers. Now Rover has been brought to reality, albeit in a much more adorable version, thanks to the engineers at Aerotain and their Skye inflatable drone.