For decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world's foremost fine artist of explosions. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his glowing footsteps in the sky at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 1,650-foot flaming ladder to heaven featured in a Netflix documentary. Recently, the gunpowder artist has become obsessed with a new threatening technology: artificial intelligence. AI "brings me more anxiety, but also, freshness", the 66-year-old Chinese artist told me last week at the historic Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, where he was preparing for his newest "explosion event", which would be the kickoff of a major arts festival opening in southern California this month. "It's similar to why I use gunpowder," Cai told me.

This paper explores the potential of generative AI within interactive art, employing a practice-based research approach. It presents the interactive artwork "Visions of Destruction" as a detailed case study, highlighting its innovative use of generative AI to create a dynamic, audience-responsive experience. This artwork applies gaze-based interaction to dynamically alter digital landscapes, symbolizing the impact of human activities on the environment by generating contemporary collages created with AI, trained on data about human damage to nature, and guided by audience interaction. The transformation of pristine natural scenes into human-made and industrialized landscapes through viewer interaction serves as a stark reminder of environmental degradation. The paper thoroughly explores the technical challenges and artistic innovations involved in creating such an interactive art installation, emphasizing the potential of generative AI to revolutionize artistic expression, audience engagement, and especially the opportunities for the interactive art field. It offers insights into the conceptual framework behind the artwork, aiming to evoke a deeper understanding and reflection on the Anthropocene era and human-induced climate change. This study contributes significantly to the field of creative AI and interactive art, blending technology and environmental consciousness in a compelling, thought-provoking manner.

As a discipline, crowd science has acknowledged the need to understand the nature of human collective phenomena before trying to explain them, and a number of attempts have been made to specify and classify different crowd types and behaviours. However, these typologies are often partial, over-fitted to a specific crowd type, or use arbitrary and/or subjective labels for behaviours of complex origin (for example, "panic"). Moreover, they tend to be relatively inflexible, and do not reflect the fluid nature of crowd behaviour (and how this might influence the crowd's structure and impact over time). For example, a static typology might not capture a situation in which a peaceful demonstration can quickly turn into a riot, or how a physical crowd moving around a shopping mall can suddenly become united into a psychological crowd in response to a shared grievance or an external threat. In this paper, we present an alternative to the typology approach; a dynamic, state-based model of crowds, structured around an existing assembly-action-dispersal framework. Our model draws on the statechart formalism from computer science. This approach is relatively objective, can capture the dynamic evolution of a crowd over time, and (unlike existing typologies, which are relatively static) allows for the natural description of how sub-groups emerge within a crowd. This new model may be useful for describing the evolution of incidents such as riots or emergencies, but it is equally well-suited to the study of expected, "normal" crowds.

Adam Smith developed a version of moral philosophy where better decisions are made by interrogating an impartial spectator within us. We discuss the possibility of using an external non-human-based substitute tool that would augment our internal mental processes and play the role of the impartial spectator. Such tool would have more knowledge about the world, be more impartial, and would provide a more encompassing perspective on moral assessment.

Like so many cities before it, Phoenix went all out to host the Super Bowl earlier this month. Expecting about 1 million fans to come to town for the biggest American sporting event of the year, the city rolled out a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles to ferry visitors from the airport. Robots sifted through the trash to pull out anything that could be composted. There were less visible developments, too. In preparation for the game, the local authorities upgraded a network of cameras around the city's downtown--and have kept them running after the spectators have left.

In every field--health, education, marketing, production, and sports--AI has managed to outperform itself. The sports industry is being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence, much like every other significant sector. AI has touched every sports aspect at the quantitative, statistical, and analytical levels. The sports market has grown significantly. Game nights have become very popular thanks to the crazed devotees who have brought in a lot of money.

The FIA confirmed at Friday's World Motor Sport Council meeting that the new device, mandatory on all Rally1 hybrid cars next year, will take the form of a forward facing in-car camera. A statement issued by the FIA, which also confirmed the 2022 calendar, revealed that the camera will have the ability to scan the stage for hazards and can be used to analyse the position of spectators. Spectator safety has been an ongoing issue in rallying and a number of stages have been cancelled this season due to fans standing in dangerous locations. However, moves to improve spectator safety through technical devices have been in the pipeline for a while. Exactly how the device works and will be utilised is yet to be explained by the FIA and WRC. "Starting from 2022, the FIA Artificial Intelligence Safety Camera (AISC) will become mandatory in all Rally1 cars," read a statement from the FIA.

After being delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 Olympics schedule is in full swing, albeit without spectators in the stands. Aside from featuring top athletic competition from nations around the globe, the quadrennial event is also showcasing several cutting-edge innovations ranging from robotics and artificial intelligence to virtual reality training solutions, carrying on a tradition of Olympic tech innovation history. "The Olympic Games have always been a catalyst and showcase for innovation, and when Tokyo last hosted the event, in 1964, it saw satellites used to relay live pictures to a global audience for the first time, as well as the debuts of close-pickup microphones and slow-motion replays," reads a portion of an Olympic blog post. Historically, human beings have traditionally located, chased down and seized game balls during Olympic competitions. But at the 2020 games, spectators may catch a glimpse of a few bots retrieving these spheres and other equipment during gameplay.

This year's Olympic Games may be closed to most spectators because of COVID-19, but the eyes of the world are still on the athletes thanks to dozens of cameras recording every leap, dive and flip. Among all that broadcasting equipment, track-and-field competitors might notice five extra cameras--the first step in a detailed 3-D tracking system that supplies spectators with near-instantaneous insights into each step of a race or handoff of a baton. And tracking is just the beginning. The technology on display in Tokyo suggests that the future of elite athletic training lies not merely in gathering data about the human body, but in using that data to create digital replicas of it. These avatars could one day run through hypothetical scenarios to help athletes decide which choices will produce the best outcomes.

The Olympic Games may be taking place a year late because of the pandemic, but it will still be a chance for host nation Japan to show off its world-class robotics technology. And despite spectators being kept away from the events by Covid restrictions, there will still be a string of robotic participants to help run the Tokyo Games. Japanese automaker Toyota has developed a suite of robots that will be deployed at the Games, but which are designed to show off their wider everyday applications. "The Tokyo 2020 Games are a unique opportunity for us to display Japanese robot technology," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, who is the leader of the Tokyo 2020 Robot Project. "This project will not simply be about exhibiting robots, but showcasing their practical real-life deployment helping people.