Kuchipudi dancer Avijit Das shone in parts during his performance in New Delhi.

Vinitha Nedungadi has imaginatively enlarged the repertoire in Mohiniyattam by adapting literary works and poetry in the dance form.

‘Divya Vahana’ explained the veneration of celestial carriers of deities through solo dance performances set to Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi idiom.

In her passing, Mohiniyattam has lost a crusader who widened its repertoire and gave it a new aesthetics rooted in Kerala

Sapience Analytics CEO says that improving work-time helps firms operate at peak efficiency

Employees bemoan that everything today has been reduced to chasing numbers and results

Government hopes the measure will ensure adequate domestic availability of rice, wheat and atta; it plans to bring down reserve price of rice by ₹200 a quintal, which will now be ₹2,900 a quintal

PM Modi made his comments while inaugurating the pilot project of “world’s largest grain storage plan”, which is being done across 11 States

The country is among those most vulnerable to water management risks, and has the poorest access to basic services, including water, among G-20 economies, the rating major flagged

The data will be used for formulating policies and programmes for farmers and the dairy sector

Rûwâhîne by Ifriqiyya Electrique; The Underside of Power by Algiers: our music reviews of the month.

The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist talks to Graeme Green about extremism, the refugee crisis and feeling at home in the past.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

Technique could be used to create quantum-information systems

Diplomacy is like a woman. You never know what diplomats think or feel. The recent Ford controversy also makes us wonder whether Italy gave up its humour for tough diplomacy

A collector recalls auctioning the most desired watch of all time, one worn by Paul Newman himself

Notes from Baselworld 2018, keeping an eye out for top innovations in watchmaking

Hua Hin, a mere three-hour drive from Bangkok, is meant for quiet contemplation and breathtaking ocean views

Celebrity Chef Gaggan Anand on food philosophies and handling fame

Montblanc Summit 2 comes with a range of features — and oozes style

A look at the most anticipated luxury cars of 2020

The iconic pilot’s watch returns with the Aviator 8 Mosquito —- and it’s better than before

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]

Cham : Springer, [2024]

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024]

Toronto : Canadian Scholars, 2024.

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2024]

Kannada actor Kishore hopes the response to ‘Kantara’ will encourage Kannada filmmakers to explore new content in different ways

‘Mahadev Ka Gorakhpur’, starring Ravi Kishan in the lead, is based around the Aghori sadhus and will be dubbed in multiple languages

Sundeep Kishan reinvents himself in this moody period gangster drama by director Ranjit Jeyakodi that has a lot going for it, yet falls short of finding its strong voice

Upendra’s gangster drama is similar to ‘KGF’ in more than just the looks, flavour, and genre; it’s a rip-off loaded with empty shells of everything that made Prashanth Neel’s films enjoyable

Sai Dharam Tej and Samyuktha Menon’s Telugu supernatural thriller ‘Virupaksha’ delivers the thrills, aided by deft storytelling and an able technical team

Actor Bellamkonda Sreenivas talks about his debut in Hindi cinema with the redux of Rajamouli-Prabhas blockbuster ‘Chatrapathi’

B V Nandini Reddy, director of the Telugu film ‘Anni Manchi sakunamule’, talks about understanding relationships across age groups and what she learnt from Sooraj Barjatya films

Meet Anurag Reddy, Sharath Chandra and Chandru Manoharan, the men behind Telugu films ‘Mem Famous’ and ‘Writer Padmabhushan’

The Nikhil Siddhartha starrer attempts to merge a personal story with secret files pertaining to Subhas Chandra Bose and the result is a listless thriller, thanks to several old tropes

Director Ram Abbaraju’s ‘Samajavaragamana’ offers plenty of laughs that override the film’s shortcomings. Sree Vishnu and Naresh are a riot

Boyapati Sreenu and Ram Pothineni’s Telugu action entertainer titled ‘Skanda - the attacker’

Hackers have been targeting delivery, postal, financial services and human resources

Covid-19 themed attacks continue to be used by hacker groups to make quick money

Designed for enterprises and businesses, the offering includes ASUS ExpertBook range of six laptops, the ASUSPRO ExperCenter range of three desktops, as well as two ‘All in Ones’

Russia, Brazil and the USA are at the top of Kaspersky’s 2020 list of countries hit by the secret surveillance software

This special notebook isn’t space, but giving you more display to work with

It has launched new Predator Triton and Helios Series gaming notebooks