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37 World’s top 2% Scientists participate in Chandigarh University’s 10th International Faculty Development Program 2026

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130 Renowned Global Academicians from over 100 Universities across 40 Countries Participating in the 10th International Faculty Development Program 

CHANDIGARH, India, June 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The 10th edition of the International Faculty Development Program (IFDP) – 2026 commenced today here at Chandigarh University, with the participation of more than 130 renowned academicians, researchers, scientists and academic leaders from over 100 universities across 40 countries. Organized with the objective of advancing the internationalization goals envisioned under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the program serves as a global platform for academic engagement, knowledge exchange and cross-border collaboration, providing a global platform for students and faculty members to gain exposure to global academic expertise and emerging research trends.

This edition of IFDP has brought together experts from 58 QS-ranked universities, including six academicians from institutions ranked among the world’s Top 20 universities. The program is also being attended by 37 scientists featured among the world’s Top 2% researchers, making it one of the most prominent international academic forums hosted by an Indian university.

While the inaugural session was graced by Prof. Pankaj Arora, Chairperson, National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) as Chief Guest, Prof. (Dr.) Jurg Bahler, Director, Institute of Healthy Ageing and Professor of Systems Biology, University College London, United Kingdom; Prof. Dr. Luke Dickens, Founding Member and Co-Lead of the Knowledge Information and Data Science (KIDS) Research Group and Associate Professor of Machine Learning, University College London, UK; and Dr. Ian John Dixon, Associate Professor of Screenwriting, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, attended the event as Guests of Honour.

Prof. (Dr.) RS Bawa, Advisor to Chancellor of Chandigarh University; Prof. (Dr.) Raviraja N Seetharam, Vice-Chancellor, Chandigarh University; and Prof. (Dr.) Rajan Sharma, Executive Director, International Affairs, among other academicians from different nations were also present on the occasion.

The participating experts represent leading institutions from Norway, Germany, Australia, Finland, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, France, Israel, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Portugal, Qatar, Taiwan, Oman, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Malaysia, Thailand, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Lebanon, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Morocco, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ethiopia and several other countries.

Speaking during the inaugural session, Prof. Pankaj Arora, Chairperson, National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), Government of India, said, “Our nation has a rich legacy of knowledge creation, with ancient centres of learning such as Takshashila and Nalanda attracting scholars from across the world. Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of that legacy as both the performance and representation of Indian universities have risen sharply over the past few years. Under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, transformative educational reforms have been introduced under the National Education Policy that accelerated our focus on research, innovation and academic excellence, resulting in India’s remarkable rise as global knowledge powerhouse in research and innovation in recent years. Programs such as Chandigarh University’s International Faculty Development Program play an important role in strengthening global academic partnerships, elevating the quality of higher education and preparing the academicians to contribute towards India’s journey of becoming a developed nation by 2047.”

Prof. Dr. Luke Dickens, Associate Professor, Machine Learning at University College London, said, “Today, Artificial Intelligence has advanced at an unprecedented pace and we are gradually becoming increasingly dependent on it. However, we must move forward with caution. While AI offers immense opportunities, it also presents significant challenges and potential risks. Addressing these challenges will require a research-driven and evidence-based approach. We must ensure that AI is developed and applied in ways that genuinely enhance our everyday lives and serve the greater good. As members of academia, it is our responsibility to become thought leaders and help shape the world into a place that we aspire make it. Chandigarh University’s visionary approach and guiding principles are truly remarkable and represent the key ingredients required for any university to achieve global success. These very principles have enabled Chandigarh University to attain its present standing on the world stage. I am deeply impressed by the University’s remarkable rise in global rankings. It is an extraordinary achievement.”

Dr. Ian John Dixon, Associate Professor of Screenwriting at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said, “At a time when technology is capable of accomplishing almost everything, Artificial Intelligence can never replace human experience, creativity and the power of storytelling. Young people should leverage technology to share the stories, culture, and knowledge of their country with the world. Chandigarh University has truly embraced a student-centric approach to education. Here, Discover, Learn and Empower is not merely a slogan but the guiding philosophy of learning. I firmly believe that Chandigarh University is poised to achieve greater global recognition in the years ahead and has the potential to become the world’s leading university.”

Prof. (Dr.) Raviraja N Seetharam, Vice-Chancellor, Chandigarh University, said, “The International Faculty Development Program has evolved into a globally recognised platform for academic exchange and collaborative research. The initiative continues to strengthen international partnerships and create opportunities for meaningful engagement between scholars, researchers and institutional leaders from around the world. Over the years, IFDP has emerged as a vibrant platform for sharing best practices in teaching, learning and research while promoting internationalisation in higher education. By bringing together accomplished academicians and thought leaders from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, the program contributes to the development of globally relevant and future-ready educational ecosystems.”

“Achieving a significant milestone, Chandigarh University has secured the 526th rank in the QS World University Rankings 2027 and earlier, CU became the number one private university consecutively for three years in QS Asia University Rankings 2026. CU now ranks amongst the top 2 percent of universities worldwide and top 1 percent universities in India and has established as many as 530 international collaborations with leading global universities,” added the Vice-Chancellor.

The global cohort represents diverse academic disciplines including engineering, artificial intelligence, computer science, management, allied health sciences, architecture, legal studies, liberal arts and humanities, teacher education, biotechnology, pharmacy, data science, sustainability studies, social sciences and other emerging interdisciplinary domains.

The 10-day program will feature expert lectures, panel discussions, thematic sessions, research interactions and collaborative engagements designed to equip educators with contemporary pedagogical practices, emerging technological insights and global perspectives on higher education.

About Chandigarh University

Chandigarh University is a NAAC A+ Grade University and QS World Ranked University. This autonomous educational institution is approved by UGC and is located near Chandigarh in the state of Punjab. It is the youngest university in India and the only private university in Punjab to be honoured with A+ Grade by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council). CU offers more than 109 UG and PG programs in the field of engineering, management, pharmacy, law, architecture, journalism, animation, hotel management, commerce, and others. It has been awarded as The University with Best Placements by WCRC.

Website address: https://www.cuchd.in/

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/3001726/Chandigarh_Univ_IFDP2026.jpg

 

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Cboe Clear U.S. Receives SEC Approval to Expand Clearing Capabilities

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SEC registration enables Cboe Clear U.S. to clear binary securities options alongside futures, positioning it to support innovation across the market

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe: CBOE), a leading global markets operator and pioneer in equity and index derivatives, today announced that Cboe Clear U.S., LLC (CCUS) has received temporary registration from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to operate as a Covered Clearing Agency.

The registration expands CCUS’s clearing capabilities beyond its existing authorities as a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-registered Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) to clear securities products in addition to futures and swaps products. Together with recent enhancements to its regulatory framework and product scope, the milestone positions CCUS to support innovation and emerging opportunities across a broad range of assets and markets.

CCUS will initially use its SEC registration to clear Cboe’s binary securities options tied to specified corporate key performance indicators (KPIs), which are planned to list on Cboe Options Exchange and be available on Robinhood in the fourth-quarter 2026. CCUS also recently received CFTC approval to clear margined futures broadly and continues to clear digital asset derivatives under its DCO designation.

“Clearing plays a critical role in bringing innovation to market,” said Dale Michaels, Head of Cboe Clear U.S. “These expanded capabilities position Cboe Clear U.S. to become an innovation lane to support new products and meet evolving customer needs, while maintaining the rigorous risk management standards that are fundamental to our business.”

These efforts complement Cboe’s longstanding partnership with The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC)® and Cboe’s continued commitment to supporting the established clearing infrastructure for traditional equity options.

The development builds on the growth of Cboe’s established European clearing business, where Cboe Clear Europe has become the leading pan-European equities central counterparty, while expanding into new services such as securities financing transaction clearing. Together, these advances demonstrate Cboe’s ability to extend its clearing capabilities across markets and asset classes.

To support its own future growth, CCUS has strengthened its infrastructure over the past year, including electing in June to become a Subpart C DCO. In doing so, CCUS is voluntarily adopting the enhanced standards the CFTC applies to systemically important DCOs for financial resources, risk management and operational resilience, aligning with those applied to leading global clearing organizations.

About Cboe Global Markets

Cboe Global Markets (Cboe: CBOE) is a leading global markets operator with a long history of innovation in equity and index derivatives. Since launching the world’s first listed options exchange in 1973, Cboe has pioneered landmark products, including the introduction of S&P 500® index options and the creation of the VIX® Index, the world’s leading gauge of market volatility, reshaping how investors manage risk and access opportunity. Today, Cboe operates derivatives, equities, and FX markets, providing trading, clearing, and investment solutions for customers worldwide. To learn more, visit www.cboe.com.

Cboe Media Contacts

 

Cboe Analyst Contact

 

Angela Tu

+1-646-856-8734

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+44 (0) 7593-506-719

tcave@cboe.com

Kenneth Hill, CFA

+1-312-786-7559

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Cboe®, Cboe Global Markets®, and VIX ® are registered trademarks or service marks of Cboe Exchange, Inc and S&P 500® is a registered trademark of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. 

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. You can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “may,” “might,” “should,” “expect,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential” or “continue,” and the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. All statements that reflect our expectations, assumptions or projections about the future other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions about us, may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements.

We operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible to predict all risks and uncertainties, nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements.

Some factors that could cause actual results to differ include: the loss of our right to exclusively list and trade certain index options and futures products; economic, political and market conditions; compliance with legal and regulatory obligations; price and new products and services competition and consolidation in our industry; decreases in trading or clearing volumes, market data fees or a shift in the mix of products traded on our exchanges; legislative or regulatory changes or changes in tax regimes; our ability to protect our systems and communication networks from security vulnerabilities and breaches; our ability to attract and retain skilled management and other personnel; increasing competition by foreign and domestic entities; our business and operational dependence on and exposure to risk from third parties; factors that impact the quality and integrity of our and other applicable indices; our ability to manage our global operations, growth, and strategic acquisitions, wind downs, divestitures, or alliances effectively; increases in the cost of the products and services we use; our ability to operate our business without violating the intellectual property rights of others and the costs associated with protecting our intellectual property rights; our ability to minimize the risks, including our credit, liquidity, market, investment, counterparty, and default risks, associated with operating our  clearinghouses; our ability to accommodate trading and clearing volume and transaction traffic, including significant increases, without failure or degradation of performance of our systems; misconduct by those who use our markets or our products or for whom we clear transactions; challenges to our use of open source software code; our ability to meet our compliance obligations, including managing our business interests and our regulatory responsibilities; the loss of key customers or a significant reduction in trading or clearing volumes by key customers; damage to our reputation; the ability of our compliance and risk management methods to effectively monitor and manage our risks; restrictions imposed by our debt obligations and our ability to make payments on or refinance our debt obligations; our ability to maintain an investment grade credit rating; impairment of our goodwill, long-lived assets, investments or intangible assets; the accuracy of our estimates and expectations; and litigation risks and other liabilities. More detailed information about factors that may affect our actual results to differ may be found in our filings with the SEC, including in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025 and other filings made from time to time with the SEC.

We do not undertake, and we expressly disclaim, any duty to update any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

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SOURCE Cboe Global Markets, Inc.

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Hears Everything, Uploads Nothing: VoxNexus Launches Android’s First Low-Power On-Device Always-On Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI)

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VoxNexus’ new on-device ambient listening solution runs for 12 hours on 2.49% of a phone’s battery and never sends audio to the cloud

MADRID, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — VoxNexus (www.VoxNexus.ai) released VoxEdge, an on-device voice stack that brings speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis to affordable Android devices, entirely offline. VoxEdge supports speech recognition in 36 languages, translation in 103 languages, and speech synthesis in 45 languages—all running with no connection, no data bundle, and no cloud token bills.

AI should work for everyone, not just for speakers of a handful of mainstream languages. Yet across much of Africa, voice AI has been held back by scarce training data and the lack of targeted fine-tuning. Everyday speech also includes code-switching and dialect variation, while cloud-based inference costs can make deployment at scale expensive. 

VoxNexus’s solutions run entirely on device, and every query is free once the model is installed on the device. Its speech recognition model has as few as 65 million parameters and achieves a lower word error rate than open-source models nearly ten times its size.

“Under-resource languages aren’t small languages. Hundreds of millions of people speak them. Until now, AI models just haven’t learned them yet,” said Charles Shi, CEO of VoxNexus.

VoxNexus also launched VoxSense, an on-device ambient listening solution that uses only 162 mAh for 12 hours of continuous listening, around 2.5% of a 6,500 mAh phone battery. By keeping all processing on device, VoxSense makes always-on listening practical without draining the battery and without sending any audio to the cloud. Developers and device makers can easily integrate it through a license and a simple SDK. Developers can request a free trial here: www.VoxNexus.ai.

VoxSense and VoxEdge were unveiled at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on October 19.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of VoxNexus AI. 

About VoxNexus:
VoxNexus builds AI that hears and speaks — for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Its audio intelligence runs entirely on-device, delivering low latency, built-in privacy, and zero token cost across any device with a chip. VoxNexus is headquartered in Singapore. Website: www.VoxNexus.ai. Contact: public@voxnexus.ai  

VoxNexus demonstrates live on-device speech recognition at the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 launch in Madrid on Oct. 19, 2026. Spanish and English conversations were transcribed in real time on the phone, with no cloud connection. (Photo: VoxNexus) 

Speaks Your Language, No Internet Needed: VoxNexus Brings On-Device Voice Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 100+ Languages to Affordable Android Devices

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SOURCE VoxNexus AI

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team.blue extends €1.1 billion of its Term Loan B to 2032 in the largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months

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GHENT, Belgium, Oct. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — team.blue, a leading pan-European provider of digital solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) backed by Hg, CPP Investments and Sofina, today announces the successful pricing of an amendment and maturity extension for €1.1 billion of its existing €1.35 billion Term Loan B. The transaction priced on 22 October 2026, with the refinanced tranche extended from September 2029 to July 2032, reinforcing the Company’s prudent capital structure approach.

Strong demand from a broad group of institutional investors enabled team.blue to upsize the transaction twice in-market, taking the final deal size to €1.1 billion from a minimum initial launch size of €500 million, despite recent credit market volatility. Pro forma for the transaction, c.90% of team.blue’s term debt now matures in 2032.

The transaction comes at a time of significant momentum for team.blue, with continued double-digit revenue growth and strong cash generation supporting its deleveraging trajectory. Its products help Europe’s SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant, and AI-enabled products are increasingly driving new customer growth. team.blue continues to innovate across its portfolio, from smarter tools within its brands to secure European cloud hosting built for customers’ growing AI workloads. Its category-leading SaaS brands are also integrating with leading AI assistants, bringing team.blue’s products to customers wherever they work.

Transaction highlights

The largest software Euro term loan issuance in the last 12 months€1.1 billion Term Loan B, borrowed by team.blue Finco S.à r.l., maturing July 2032Priced at E + 425bps with a 0% floor and an OID of 98.5Upsized twice from an initial €500 million, reflecting a heavily oversubscribed order bookCorporate and facility ratings of B3 (Moody’s) and B (S&P), both with stable outlooksBofA acted as Global Coordinator and Left Lead Physical Bookrunner, alongside Barclays. ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citi, ING and J.P. Morgan acted as Bookrunners

Jonathan Thackray, Chief Financial Officer of team.blue, said:
“We set out to extend €500 million of our Term Loan B, and the depth of support from our institutional investor base allowed us to go much further. This reflects confidence in team.blue’s highly recurring, cash-generative model and our position as a leading digital partner for Europe’s SMBs. It gives us the flexibility to keep innovating and investing in the digital and AI-enabled tools our customers rely on.”

About team.blue
team.blue is the pan-European digital partner for small and medium businesses, serving more than 3.5 million customers in 24 countries. From web hosting, domains, email and cloud and AI infrastructure to e-commerce, engagement, payments and compliance tools, team.blue helps SMBs get online, get customers, get paid and stay compliant. Supported by more than 4,000 employees, team.blue’s vision is to make online business success simpler, with artificial intelligence at every step. 

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