As urban mobility giants like Boeing, Hyundai, Airbus, Toyota, Uber and Joby Aviation plan to soon ferry passengers in air taxis, the homegrown ePlane Company is all set to to build India's first flying electric taxi to make passenger commute and cargo transport up to 10 times faster, says its founder and CTO Satya Chakravarthy The startup is in the final stages of building a sub-scale version of the flying aircraft and expects to commence its flight trials in the next couple of months. "We are developing the full-scale prototype, the ePlane e200, and aim to have the e200 cargo variant built towards the end of 2022 and undergo the certification process through the next year for it to be ready for commercial deployment approximately by late 2023," Chakravarthy told IANS. The passenger version of the ePlane e200 would undergo additional development and flight tests for a more rigorous certification process, "which would take us until 2024 for its certification and their commercialisation as air taxis will happen subsequently," he noted. The market for flying cars, now known as electric air taxis, can reach $1.5 trillion globally by 2040, according to a recent study by Morgan Stanley Research. Earlier this year, the ePlane company that aims to develop electric planes for short-range intra-city commutes, raised $5 million in a pre-series A round.

Companies today are awash in data, but current tools and processes are not enabling them to keep it secure. That's according to Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy, whose says his company -- which has traditionally focused on data management and integration -- is embarking on a major push to go further into data security. "You hear about breaches all the time -- just imagine all the ones you're not hearing about," Chakravarthy said in a recent interview. "Data security today is an unsolved problem for customers." Last year, Informatica launched a product called Secure@Source that promises a data-centric approach to information security by helping organizations identify and visualize sensitive data wherever it resides.

The University of Maryland's Computer Science Department conducts a broad research program in both theoretical and applied artificial intelligence. Nine faculty and more than fifty research associates and graduate students are involved in AI research. Projects are funded by a large number of government agencies, as well as by several major corporations. The computing environment will improve dramatically over the next several years, due in large part to Coordinated Experimental Research Department by the National Science Foundation in 1982. In addition to the research program in AI, the Department offers a large number of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels on all facets of AI. The principal AI laboratories also sponsor numerous colloquia by visiting scientists and permanent laboratory personnel. The principal research areas are computer vision, search and decision making, parallel problems solving, and database research.