Voted.

There’s been a recent surge in news reports about schools, including those in Kerala, incorporating AI into classrooms.

I've written an article discussing my concerns about this trend, along with potential approaches to consider.
thottingal.in/blog/2024/04/2…

The first CFP for the 2024 edition of *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century* conference is out (grafematik2024.sciencesconf.org). Please, ① spread the word, ② submit a paper, ③ join us in Venice, Italy (physically or virtually) on October 23-25, 2024!

In a world with abundant computational resources where nothing is forgotten and where we are connected in pervasive, unexpected ways beyond our choice, it is resonable to stop and ask ourselves just what kind of world we hope to create.

കാട്ടിൽ പുല്ലരിയാൻ പോയവർ അരിവാൾ മരത്തിൽ കൊണ്ടപ്പോൾ ചോരവരുന്നതു കണ്ടെന്നും അങ്ങനെ അവിടെ അമ്പലങ്ങൾ വന്നെന്നുമുള്ള ഐതിഹ്യമാലയിലെ കഥകൾ ഓർമ്മവരുന്നു.

How can we extend the capabilities of English LLMs to other languages? Sharing a survey that I did recently of the literature in this area:

anoopkunchukuttan.gitlab.io/publications/p…

'Manjummel Boys' reached ₹200 crore club, becoming the the highest grossing Malayalam film ever. 👏

A little behind-the-scenes tidbit: those Malayalam subtitles you've been noticing during the Tamil dialogue scenes? Yep, they're in the Manjari font that I designed!

Kuttippencil is a short film directed by Hena Chandran.

It features the fonts I designed: Nupuram Caligraphy in the title and Chilanka for credits.
youtube.com/watch?v=FgRaiP…

Hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) at r/developersIndia now.

reddit.com/r/developersIn…

🚀IndicLLMSuite Launch Announcement!🚀

We're thrilled to unveil IndicLLMSuite: A collection of data resources and tools for developing Indic LLMs.

📜 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2403.06350
🌐 Blog (the way forward): ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/blog/indicllm-…
💻 Resources: github.com/AI4Bharat/Indi…
(1/n)

Clear up your schedule for this Saturday, because we have a new AMA incoming!

We are excited to have Santhosh Thottingal, Principal Engineer Wikimedia Foundation for An AMA on language computing & typeface designing

Learn more about Santhosh in our full announcement 👇🏼
reddit.com/r/developersIn…

Is Cosine-Similarity of Embeddings Really About Similarity?

Netflix cautions against blindly using cosine similarity as a measure of semantic similarity between learned embeddings, as it can yield arbitrary and meaningless results.

📝arxiv.org/abs/2403.05440

Thank you College of Engineering Trivandrum and APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University for hosting the most memorable graduation ceremony. 😀

Usually I don't do a photo dump, but if not now when? So here it is.

PhDone!!

We are organizing an online talk on 'മലയാളത്തിന്റെ ഡിജിറ്റൽ സൗന്ദര്യം' this Saturday, March 9th at 7PM.

The talk will be about digital Malayalam typography. You can find the slides here: santhoshtr.github.io/malayalam-digi…

The link to the talk will be posted in our Telegram & Matrix groups

Since I've been away from this space for a while — are there any longform publications out there actively interested in commissioning pieces on Indian history, language, and identity? With a focus on ties across the Indian Ocean or Central Asia

Google's new policy if you want to enable AI features:

'Please do not include sensitive, confidential, or personal information that can be used to identify you or others'

Pretty soon this will be stuffed into the T&Cs of many cloud-based apps, that you agree to implicitly.

An update on surya text recognition - I'm happy with the data/architecture, and I'm ready to scale up training.

Here are some results from a (very) early checkpoint. Left is original, right is OCR (Malayalam)

It's been a while since we posted monthly newsletters. Here is the newsletter of January 2024! ✨

blog.smc.org.in/smc-monthly-re…

Loud Rant:

I came to know that the surprisingly low WER in #whisper ASR for Malayalam reported in the Hugging Face fine-tuning event last year was just because the evaluation script removed all the vowel signs before computing WER!!! 😡
And the leaderboard now means NOTHING

I've made that point before:
- LLM: 1E13 tokens x 0.75 word/token x 2 bytes/token = 1E13 bytes.
- 4 year old child: 16k wake hours x 3600 s/hour x 1E6 optical nerve fibers x 2 eyes x 10 bytes/s = 1E15 bytes.

In 4 years, a child has seen 50 times more data than the biggest LLMs.…