Post-acquisition, Red Hat bullish on India growth story; AI-driven tech can detect fake pictures

Red Hat continues to be bullish on India. Indian-origin researchers working on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology to identify fake pictures.

Red Hat to step up India operations

Nearly a month after International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) concluded the $34 billion acquisition of enterprise cloud solutions provider Red Hat, a top executive of the North Carolina based-company said it is ready to expand the scope and accelerate the pace of its operations in India, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported.

Red Hat’s open source development model will catalyse growth globally, John Allessio, senior vice president and general manager, global services, Red Hat Inc said.

Red Hat has research and development facilities in Bengaluru and Pune, with the latter being its largest engineering facility in the world outside of the US, the report said.

The firm, heralded for bringing open source technologies to the mainstream, reported $3.4 billion in revenue for the financial year 2018-2019.

Allessio said Red Hat still remains an independent software company but IBM is now an internal shareholder. He added that IBM plays the role of a strategic business partner, rather than advising it on go-to-market operations, development or support functions. 

Red Hat’s enterprise-based solutions are widely used by public sector agencies and firms in the technology, finance, healthcare and aviation segments. 

Ameeta Roy, director, solution architecture at Red Hat, told TechCircle in an interview that the firm, which specialises in Linux operating systems, offers true portability in its hybrid cloud package which is not possible on public and private cloud infrastructure made available by competitors. 

In May, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 8 was made available to enterprises to run cloud operations and workloads. The firm’s latest operating system is capable of running tasks based on technologies like AI and the internet of things (IoT) and comes to boot with updated security standards. 

AI-driven deep neural network to curb deepfakes menace

A team of Indian-origin researchers, led by Amit Roy-Chowdhury, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside, has developed an AI-driven system capable of distinguishing manipulated images or deepfakes from untampered ones, the IANS said. 

The AI-powered deep neural programme will be able to verify the authenticity of images right down to the pixels forming the picture.

When a new image is run through their system, it can gauge whether the image is manipulated or not, Chowdhury was quoted as saying in the report. The system also has the capability to pinpoint the region where the tampering occurred. 

The researchers have been testing the neural network with images it had never been exposed to and was able to identify tampered images more often than not, even spotting the manipulated regions of the images. 

Roy-Chowdhury believes it will be a long time before automated tools will be capable of detecting deepfakes.