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Riyadh Season 2023: Fresh Identity, Global Entertainment Experiences

Riyadh Season 2023: Fresh Identity, Global Entertainment Experiences
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Riyadh Season 2023: Fresh Identity, Global Entertainment Experiences

Riyadh Season 2023: Fresh Identity, Global Entertainment Experiences

Turki Al-Sheikh, the head of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA), revealed an innovative and fresh identity for the fourth edition of “Riyadh Season,” set to launch on October 28 under the banner of “BigTime.”

Al-Sheikh expressed deep appreciation for the boundless support that the entertainment sector has received from King Salman bin Abdulaziz and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“This year’s season opening ceremony will be organized by the world’s finest event planners, featuring renowned celebrities and will be accompanied by the ‘Riyadh Season Championship Belt Fight,’ which is the first and largest event of its kind, marking one of the heavyweight boxing’s biggest showdowns,” said Al-Sheikh on Sunday.

Riyadh Season, in its fourth edition, aims to create more than 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and enable nearly 2,000 local and international companies covering an area of more than 7 million square meters of entertainment experiences around the world.

Al-Sheikh announced a new zone, called ‘Boulevard Hall,’ which was built, within 60 days by adopting international artistic and technical standards, on an area spreading over 200,000 square meters, and can accommodate more than 40,000 visitors at a time.

“The ‘Boulevard City’ has completely changed from what it was in the past seasons, as it will embrace global experiences, of which 60% are new,” revealed the GEA head.

The most prominent of which are the centenary celebrations of Disney through “Disney Castle”, which will be presented in the season for the first time and ‘House of Hype,’ which is the largest experience linking the real world and virtual reality.

Moreover, around 30 different interactive experiences, and many other activities will be featured this season.

The GEA chief also announced the establishment of the Legend Museum, the first and largest museum for football legends, as it showcases more than 30,000 rare artifacts and various interactive experiences.

It is considered as the second branch in the world after the Madrid branch. It will feature the CR7 Experience, an exclusive museum designed around Cristiano Ronaldo, featuring his experiences and showcasing Ronaldo’s signature and life story.

It will display all his trophies, personal memorabilia as well as interactive experiences.

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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
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A Stroke Survivor Speaks Again with the Help of an Experimental Brain-Computer Implant

The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)
The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. (Getty Images)

Scientists have developed a device that can translate thoughts about speech into spoken words in real time.

Although it’s still experimental, they hope the brain-computer interface could someday help give voice to those unable to speak.

A new study described testing the device on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who couldn’t speak for 18 years after a stroke. Doctors implanted it in her brain during surgery as part of a clinical trial.

It "converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences," said Gopala Anumanchipalli, a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Other brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, for speech typically have a slight delay between thoughts of sentences and computerized verbalization. Such delays can disrupt the natural flow of conversation, potentially leading to miscommunication and frustration, researchers said.

This is "a pretty big advance in our field," said Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who was not part of the study.

A team in California recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes while she spoke sentences silently in her brain. The scientists used a synthesizer they built using her voice before her injury to create a speech sound that she would have spoken. They trained an AI model that translates neural activity into units of sound.

It works similarly to existing systems used to transcribe meetings or phone calls in real time, said Anumanchipalli, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The implant itself sits on the speech center of the brain so that it’s listening in, and those signals are translated to pieces of speech that make up sentences. It’s a "streaming approach," Anumanchipalli said, with each 80-millisecond chunk of speech – about half a syllable – sent into a recorder.

"It’s not waiting for a sentence to finish," Anumanchipalli said. "It’s processing it on the fly."

Decoding speech that quickly has the potential to keep up with the fast pace of natural speech, said Brumberg. The use of voice samples, he added, "would be a significant advance in the naturalness of speech."

Though the work was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, Anumanchipalli said it wasn't affected by recent NIH research cuts. More research is needed before the technology is ready for wide use, but with "sustained investments," it could be available to patients within a decade, he said.