India among top visa appliers for UK tech; Facebook finds backers for its cryptocurrency

India has figured among countries that have made the most number of visa applications for the United Kingdom’s technology sector, revealed data from Tech Nation, a body designated by the UK Home Office for tech visas.

For 2018-19, applications for Tier-1 exceptional talent visa for digital technology rose 45% to 650 from 450 a year before.

Nigeria, US, Russia, Canada, Australia, China and South Africa also topped the list for number of applications.

Facebook

Social media giant Facebook has enlisted a number of high-profile firms including Uber, Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, and Booking.com to support its new cryptocurrency, which may get officially announced next week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said.

Uber, Stripe, and others are reportedly investing $10 million each to support a separate organisation that will help run the new digital currency, which has been codenamed Project Libra.

Panaya

Information technology firm Infosys has started investing in automation company Panaya again, which was acquired in the Vishal Sikka era, The Economic Times said. News of the development comes more than a year after the Bengaluru-based firm had put the Israel-headquartered automation company on the block.

Infosys had paid $200 million to buy Panaya in February 2015, which has seen writedowns.

Wipro

Information technology services provider Wipro is counting on solutions based on its intellectual property (IP), The Economic Times said.

“For Wipro, the revenues generated by IPs are significant and, going forward, we plan to grow the current base at a significant rate,” Ajay Bhaskar, vice-president, strategy and IP, Wipro, said.

IP-based solutions can automate mundane tasks, for example.

Adobe

California-based software company Adobe has said in its blogpost that its researchers, along with University of California (UC), Berkeley collaborators, have developed an AI tool for detecting edits to images made using Photoshop.

While still in its early stages, this collaboration between Adobe Research and UC Berkeley, is a step towards democratising image forensics, which is the science of uncovering and analysing changes to digital images, the blogpost said.

By training an artificial neural network, a form of deep learning, the research project is able to recognise altered images of faces.

“This is an important step in being able to detect certain types of image editing, and the undo capability works surprisingly well. Beyond technologies like this, the best defence will be a sophisticated public that knows that content can be manipulated — often to delight them, but sometimes to mislead them,” said Gavin Miller, head of Adobe Research.