I n a small, crowded room in Taipei, Pan Chien-chin is trying to keep a drone hovering steadily. Imagining himself flying a plane, he gently nudges controller joysticks to guide the insect-like device as it hums through the air. Cheers break out as Pan, who has never flown a drone before, steers it around a rectangular course marked by traffic cones without crashing. Around him are about two dozen fellow trainees, all signed up for the same course: Taiwan's first civil defence drone training programme. "The war in Ukraine has really changed how drones are used," says Pan, 48, a food company worker. "It's like giving myself another skill, something I can use if it's ever needed one day," he adds.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with culturally specific content -- a challenge largely overlooked by existing benchmarks that focus on dominant languages and globalized datasets. We introduce TAIWANVQA, a VQA benchmark designed for Taiwanese culture to evaluate recognition and reasoning in regional contexts. TAIWANVQA contains 2,736 images and 5,472 manually curated questions covering topics such as traditional foods, public signs, festivals, and landmarks. The official benchmark set includes 1,000 images and 2,000 questions for systematic assessment, with the remainder of the data used as training material. Evaluations on state-of-the-art VLMs reveal strong visual recognition but notable weaknesses in cultural reasoning.

PCWorld interviewed Intel Fellow Tom Petersen at Computex 2026 about Intel's new Arc G3 Extreme chipset designed for handheld gaming PCs. Intel claims the Arc G3 Extreme delivers a 42% performance advantage over AMD's competing Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor. The chipset targets sustained high performance in thin and light portable devices, potentially revolutionizing the handheld gaming market. Intel's new Arc G3 Extreme chipset could be a game-changer for handheld gaming PCs, and we got our first glimpse of how that'd be on the show floor at Computex 2026. PCWorld's Adam Patrick Murray was there in Taiwan all week checking out the future of PCs, and that included a quick chat with Intel Fellow Tom Petersen about the gaming potential of the Arc G3 Extreme.

MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld comes out on June 23 MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld comes out on June 23 The premium gaming handheld's price is expected to be around $1,500. A new wave of premium handhelds is on the way and MSI's upcoming Claw 8 EX AI+ is leading the charge. The company revealed its latest handheld during a hands-on event at its headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan before Computex 2026. The Claw 8 EX AI+ will follow up MSI's previous handhelds introduced in 2024 that start at around $800, but is reportedly going to cost as much as $1,500 . It comes out on June 23.

Japan is one of many locations in Asia where Chinese companies access American AI chips -- by renting hardware that's owned by foreign firms and installed in overseas data centers. Taiwan prosecutors suspect that three individuals successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the U.S. has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked the island democracy's first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the U.S. to take a more active role in curtailing China's tech access. When Taiwan authorities apprehended the three defendants -- who've now been officially detained -- they also seized about 50 servers for which they accuse the trio of preparing fraudulent export documents. But at least one shipment had already gone through Taiwan customs, according to the people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak about an ongoing criminal investigation.

Taiwan's economy is booming thanks to AI. For Li, an engineer at Taiwanese computer giant ASUS, the AI boom sweeping Taiwan has made it an exciting time to work in tech. Taiwan is a semiconductor powerhouse, producing about 90 percent of the most advanced chips used to power leading AI models such as ChatGPT and Claude. Still, Li worries that the spoils of Taiwan's AI windfall are not being shared equally. "Most industries unrelated to tech don't seem to be feeling the benefits, so it doesn't feel evenly distributed at the moment," Li said, explaining that many of his former classmates working outside of tech do not appear to be doing as well.

An undergraduate student first spotted the translucent species off the coast of Taiwan. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. These are some of the ingredients that come together to make, a newly identified species of sea slug, or nudibranch, found swimming in Taiwan. "Taiwanese divers call it'sesame' in Chinese and it is also small like a sesame seed, hence the name," researchers explain in a statement .

Chiefs heiress Gracie Hunt might have set a bridesmaids record, fighting in the Dover parking lot & wings! Nothing to see here: Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and his ex's bridesmaid are just friends Can't sleep, Japanese bear-fighting robo-wolves will eat me and a gorilla trade captivates the nation A replica of KITT from'Knight Rider' got a traffic ticket in another state despite being in a museum Jena Sims covers her butt with a bow at the SI Swimsuit party, the NFL saves us from Romo & is Star Wars dead? Taylor Sheridan shocks'Yellowstone' fans with new spinoff series, provides viewers with dark ride Early reviews for new'Star Wars' movie are generally horrific, but does anyone even care at this point? Retired Navy admiral makes bombshell claim about UFOs and'non-human intelligence' controlling them Mother's Day chaos at a steakhouse includes knives thrown at waiters and a touching mother-daughter arrest Japanese bear-fightin' robo-wolves are pure unleaded nightmare fuel but they're working Trump-backed Gallrein blasts Massie as'misrepresentative,' defends record ahead of Kentucky primary Expert criticizes Iran's'illusion of diplomacy,' efforts to prolong conflict with US Dr. Ben Carson urges Americans to'stand up for what they believe in' after Rededicate 250 event Armando Salguero explains why everyone wins with the Steelers and Arron Rodgers deciding to join forces again for one more season. An area of Yangmingshan National Park, which is just north of Taipei in Taiwan, is getting a lot of attention after footage captured on a wildlife livestream went viral.

Enes Kanter Freedom says Taiwan is the center of the global technology race and remains a key unresolved issue after the Trump-Xi summit produced no new discussions on chips or AI.

Online Conformal Prediction (CP) struggles to balance temporal adaptability and structural stability. Feedback-driven methods (e.g., Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI)) suffer from systemic marginal under-coverage and high interval variance during abrupt shifts, while temporally discounted Bayesian CP suffers from severe structural lag and uncalibrated interval bloat. We propose State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP) to achieve optimal spatio-temporal decoupling. By gating long-term temporal inertia with spatial kernel-density evidence, SA-BCP proactively expands intervals for recognized historical regimes while maintaining tight efficiency during stable states. We rigorously prove this mechanism's optimality, identifying a minimax bias-variance tradeoff governed by an evidence threshold $K$. Extensive benchmarks on volatile financial datasets (2016--2026), including AMD, Gold, and GBP/USD, demonstrate that SA-BCP consistently minimizes the strictly proper Winkler score across diverse confidence levels. Specifically, SA-BCP resolves the systematic under-coverage inherent to ACI variants while simultaneously reducing the uncalibrated interval bloat of Bayesian CP by 10\% to 37\% under high-confidence requests. By elegantly navigating this tradeoff, SA-BCP achieves an optimal balance between conditional reliability and predictive efficiency.