SYDNEY, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Running from Friday 22 May to Saturday 13 June, the 23‑day program brings together the full breadth of the city's creative identity across Vivid Light, Vivid Music, Vivid Minds and Vivid Food. More than 80 per cent of the festival remains free, including the entire Vivid Light Walk, an unbroken 6.5‑kilometre journey featuring over 43 installations and projections created by acclaimed local and international artists.
Minister for Jobs and Tourism Steve Kamper said Vivid Sydney will be bigger and better than ever before.
"No other city in the world can host Vivid, because no other city in the world has what Sydney has to offer. Vivid Sydney 2026 will redefine how we experience our city, delivering a bigger and bolder event program that will come to life both day and night.
"With more than 80 per cent of the program free to attend, Vivid Sydney is focused on making world-leading cultural experiences accessible to everyone. Whether it's the entire 6.5km Vivid Light Walk, free live music at Tumbalong Nights or dynamic daytime programming, this year's festival will bring colour and creativity to the city while delivering a significant boost to local businesses."
Vivid Sydney 2026 marks Brett Sheehy AO's first year as Festival Director; a creative homecoming after two decades leading major festivals and arts companies across Australia.
Vivid Sydney Festival Director Brett Sheehy AO said this year's program represents a bold new horizon for the event.
"For 2026 we are expanding our program into new artforms including aerial performance, daytime public art, theatre and dance. These join our vast Vivid Minds, Light, Music and Food offerings to now make your Vivid Sydney one of the great comprehensive arts festivals of the world.
"This year we invite you to go beyond your previous expectations of Vivid Sydney into a bold new festival designed to surprise, delight, challenge, entertain, and fill you with joy.
"Whether you encounter Vivid Sydney as a happy observer, an eager participant, or someone keen to engage with one of our dozens of interactive opportunities, we can promise you a festival of a lifetime," said Mr Sheehy.
Vivid Sydney Partners
Kia returns as a Major Partner for the fifth consecutive year in 2026, with a new installation set to feature along the Vivid Sydney Light Walk. Vivid Sydney's Supporting Partners include City of Sydney, Event Engineering, Kennards Hire, Mandylights, The P.A. People, Technical Direction Company and Transdev.
Vivid Sydney's Program Partners include Carriageworks, Sydney Opera House and Museum of Contemporary Art. Vivid Sydney's Location Partners include Australian Maritime Museum, Cockle Bay Wharf, Placemaking NSW, Port Authority of New South Wales, and State Library of New South Wales.
Tickets for Vivid Sydney are on sale now. For more information and for a full list of events, go to vividsydney.com
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A Citywide Celebration of Creativity, Day and Night: Vivid Sydney 2026 Program Revealed
A Citywide Celebration of Creativity, Day and Night: Vivid Sydney 2026 Program Revealed
SAN FRANCISCO and HANGZHOU, China, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As AI reshapes the digital world through cognitive and generative capabilities, a new frontier emerges: Physical AI — an intelligent system that perceives, reasons through, and acts in the physical world.
Today, Bota launches SAION AI, the first Physical AI platform for biomanufacturing.
SAION AI is not limited to in silico design. Instead, it is a full-stack Physical AI platform integrating cognition, orchestration, and closed-loop execution through end-to-end experimentation, and continuously optimizing biological discovery and biomanufacturing.
SAION AI is built on a three-layer architecture: Cognition, Orchestration, Execution.
Powered by large language models , the platform unifies scientific reasoning with real-world experimental execution. This architecture enables seamless orchestration from biological system understanding to laboratory experiments, forming a self-optimizing closed loop for biomanufacturing.
Cognition: Multi-Scale Biological Understanding
The Cognition Layer is built on data from Bota's Cell2Cloud Biofoundry, integrating tens of millions of experimental data points, millions of scientific publications and patents, and public biological databases. Combined with leading AI4Science models, SAION AI develops multi-scale understanding across the gene–protein–cell–fermentation continuum, enabling systematic design and data-driven scientific decisions.
Orchestration: Intelligent Research Coordination
The Orchestration Layer centers on the Agent harness orchestration engine, powered by the LLM reasoning to coordinate multi-agent collaboration, tool invocation, and end-to-end scientific workflows.
The Layer decomposes complex objectives into structured tasks and integrates 316 specialized scientific tools, enabling dynamic routing and automated research workflows with fault tolerance.
Execution: Autonomous Experimental Operation
Through Bota's proprietary Biological Protocol Language, SAION AI converts experimental designs into standardized instructions that directly drive laboratory hardware, feeding real-world data back into the Cognition Layer, enabling continuous model improvement and R&D acceleration.
Real-world Performance
SAION AI has demonstrated SOTA performance across multiple life science AI benchmarks, validating its capabilities as an AI Scientist system.
Key Results
- Literature Comprehension: 70.7% on LitQA+SuppQA — surpassing leading general-purpose models
- Sequence Reasoning: 88.2% on SeqQA across DNA, RNA and protein tasks.
- Genetic Engineering: 84.9% on gene editing and cloning benchmarks.
- Scientific Discovery: 89.6% on BAIS-SD benchmark.
Real-world validation confirms SAION AI can autonomously complete full research — from literature review to wet-lab assembly — with >90% accuracy.
Toward Autonomous Biomanufacturing
SAION AI's launch moves biomanufacturing beyond traditional trial-and-error experimentation toward an intelligent engineering discipline, where AI and physical laboratories interact to accelerate discovery and industrial scale-up.
SAION AI DEMO
Contact us: bota.pr@bota.bio
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Bota Launches SAION AI -- Physical AI Platform for Biomanufacturing
Bota Launches SAION AI -- Physical AI Platform for Biomanufacturing
