In April 2019, following the Easter Sunday bomb attacks, the Government of Sri Lanka had to shut down Facebook and YouTube for nine days to stop the spreading of hate speech and false news, posted mainly in the local languages Sinhala and Tamil. This came about simply because these social media platforms did not have the capability to detect and warn about the provocative content. India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) wants lectures on Swayama and NPTELb--the online teaching platforms--to be translated into all Indian languages. Approximately 2.5 million students use the Swayam lectures on computer science alone. The lectures are in English, which students find difficult to understand.

What would you do if you had the super-power to accurately answer, in a few milliseconds, a multiple-choice question with a billion choices? Would you design the next generation of Web search engines, which could predict which of the billions of documents might be relevant to a given query? Would you build the next generation of retail recommender systems that have things delivered to your doorstep just as you need them? Or would you try and predict the next word about to be uttered by U.S. President Donald Trump? The objective in extreme classification, a new research area in machine learning, is to develop algorithms with such capabilities.

Upward of four million graduates enter the labor market every year in India alone. India boasts of a large services economy, wherein a single company hires thousands of new employees every year. Meanwhile, product companies and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) look for a few skilled people each. This requires cost-effective and scalable methods of hiring. Interviewing every applicant is not a feasible solution.

Further, TCS eats its own dog food--it has deployed a home-grown enterprise social media platform7 and more recently a deep-learning-based conversational system across all its 400K employees.c There have been many lessons learned along this journey; we mention some critical ones here: First, research initiatives have always preceded their applicability, and so continuing to invest in research areas seemingly unrelated to the current business pays off in initially unforeseen ways. For example, research in genome-based early prediction of rare diseases4 later enabled TCS' business to build genome analysis pipelines for pharma customers. Deep expertise in computational chemistry3 is now allowing TCS to design new chemical formulations and molecules for customers, a very different kind of service that could potentially expand the very scope of its core business in the future.

What hits a visitor to India first, quite literally, is the traffic. The combination of inadequate road infrastructure, increasing vehicle population, and poor driver training and discipline makes for a chaotic and often deadly mix. The result is a high rate of road accidents, with the estimate of fatalities ranging from one every four minutesa to over 238,000 each year.b There is much ongoing work in academia, industry, and startups on using artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve the situation. The general goal is to have affordable technologies that work with humans through effective monitoring and feedback, rather than replacing humans through full autonomy.

Database management systems (DBMS) constitute the backbone of today's information-rich society. A primary reason for the popularity of database systems is their support for declarative queries, typically in the SQL query language. In this programming paradigm, the user only specifies the end objectives, leaving it to the DBMS to automatically identify the optimal execution strategy to achieve these objectives. Declarative specification of queries is also central to parallel query execution in modern big data platforms. Query processing and optimization have been extensively researched for close to five decades now, and are implemented in all contemporary database systems.

We are pleased to introduce the India Region special section to Communications' readers. The Indian subcontinent has a population close to 1.8 billion, and is unique due to its diversity of people, cultures, spoken languages, and wide disparities in socioeconomic conditions. The region plays an important role in the global computing landscape with its highly trained manpower, software companies, and top universities that produce students that not only serve local needs, but move around the world and have global impact. We developed this special section to mirror all these facets. Last year, we publicized the plans for the special section and made an open call for contributions through ACM member channels and the ACM India website.

Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR, USA.

In June, Amazon announced it was close to being able to offer for package deliveries by drone for its Prime Air service. That same month, Uber said it plans to test food delivery by aerial drone in crowded cities. And drone delivery company Flytrex already touts the ability to deliver drinks via unmanned vehicle on the golf course. Despite such announcements, drones are not crowding the skies over major cities and population centers just yet. But that may be about to change.

The year is 1989 and we're introduced to the World Wide Web. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The Exxon Valdez is spilling oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Students are calling for democracy and free speech in Tiananmen Square. Crockett and Tubbs are clearing the mean streets of Miami.