SINGAPORE - Several U.S. drone firms made their debuts at the Singapore Airshow this week, seeking to expand their business beyond the Pentagon to countries in Asia that are increasingly concerned about the threat posed by China's military buildup. The lethal success of drones on both sides of Russia's war in Ukraine has sparked a surge of Silicon Valley investment in drone and military artificial intelligence startups, boosting the valuations of U.S. firms like California-based Anduril Industries and Shield AI. This wave of interest in the next generation of warfare is reshaping the character of major air shows that have been long-dominated by gleaming commercial airliners, daredevil fighter jets and troop-carrying helicopters. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

University of Tokyo professor recommended for U.N. panel on AI Yutaka Matsuo, professor of the University of Tokyo's graduate school of engineering, has been named among 40 experts to sit on a U.N. panel on AI. | JIJI NEW YORK - Yutaka Matsuo, professor of the University of Tokyo's graduate school of engineering, has been named among the 40 experts who have been recommended by the United Nations' head to sit on the new Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced on Wednesday the list of the 40 experts recommended for the panel set up under a General Assembly resolution that passed last August. The selection is expected to be approved by the General Assembly soon. Guterres said the panel would be the first global, fully independent scientific body dedicated to helping close the AI knowledge gap and assess the real impacts of AI across economies and societies. At a time of deep geopolitical tension and growing technological rivalry, we urgently need common ground, he said. That is what this panel can help deliver.

A woman walks near the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike in Kyiv on Tuesday. KYIV - Ukrainian and Russian officials wrapped up a productive first day of new U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi, Kyiv's lead negotiator said on Wednesday, as fighting in Europe's biggest conflict since World War II raged on. The two-day trilateral meetings come after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had exploited a U.S.-backed energy truce last week to stockpile munitions, attacking Ukraine with a record number of ballistic missiles on Tuesday. The work was substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions, Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, wrote on X. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Team Mirai leader Takahiro Anno stumps in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on Jan. 27, the first day of campaigning for the Lower House election slated for Sunday. A small, 9-month-old party that has only one seat in the Upper House may gain as many seats as decadesold peers such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in Sunday's Lower House election with its unconventional campaign pledges to change politics and the government through digital technology. A weekend poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun showed Team Mirai could win up to 10 seats under the proportional representation system, more than the JCP's nine seats and Reiwa Shinsengumi's six. The party didn't have any seats in the Lower House before its dissolution. The party's founder and leader is a 35-year-old artificial intelligence engineer behind two AI startups -- Takahiro Anno. He had been working on societal reform through digital transformation when he pivoted from business to politics with the launch of Team Mirai last May.

BERLIN - German technology firm DeepL, known for its artificial intelligence-powered translation software, plans to release a Japanese-language version of its real-time interpretation software by the end of this year, a senior company official has said. The age of machine interpretation has arrived, said Leonardo Doin, head of engineering and research for real-time voice translation service DeepL Voice, in a recent interview. You can just wear an earpiece and ... you can just hear it (foreign-language speech) in your language anytime, Doin said. The interpretation software will integrate DeepL's speech recognition and machine translation technologies, and speech synthesis technology that mimics the tones of the speakers' voices. It will be able to handle multiple languages and speakers, he said, with the software's use in online meetings of multinational companies in mind. DeepL plans to roll out the software on smartphones as well.

Elon Musk attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22. PARIS - French police raided the offices of Elon Musk's social media network X on Tuesday, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in a widening investigation, amid growing scrutiny of the platform by authorities across Europe. The raid by the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit and Musk's summoning -- which could further increase tensions between Europe and the U.S. over Big Tech and free speech -- are linked to a yearlong investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives. Britain's privacy watchdog, meanwhile, also kicked off a formal investigation into Musk's artificial-intelligence chatbot Grok over the processing of personal data and its potential to produce harmful sexual images and video content. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.