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Time of India
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
IIIT-H professor uses dice to develop dancing tool; earns rare patent
1 2 Hyderabad: Roll the dice and learn a new dance form — be it Bharatanatyam or Freestyle. This effortless yet engaging concept of dance education is what has recently won Jayachandran Surendran, a lecturer at the International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad (IIIT-H), a rare patent in the field of arts. Jayachandran secured the patent for, Atam, a teaching tool that he believes makes learning dance as intuitive as rolling dice. It was born out of the academic's 10-year-long urge to make dancing more appealing to students with no rhythm or prior training — and limited interest in some cases. Dance postures on dice You Can Also Check: Hyderabad AQI | Weather in Hyderabad | Bank Holidays in Hyderabad | Public Holidays in Hyderabad So how does Atam work? "It is a small rectangular box with dice and eight slots. Each of the six faces of every die displays a dance posture," explained Jayachandran. "Students can roll one or two dice and practice whichever posture appears on the top face. The postures focus on lower body movements, giving individuals complete freedom to use their hands however they want," said the lecturer, who teaches dance at the Centre for Exact Humanities, IIIT-H. Atam, he said, can be used to learn and practice postures, footwork variations, movement, and even body angles. Initially the engineer-turned-dancer used to project dance postures on a screen for students to learn. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Salma Hayek, 58,Shows Her Huge Size In New Photos Boite A Scoop Undo "But it wasn't very interesting or engaging. I wanted students to interact and participate. So I developed this tool and the feedback has been great," he said. Can learn all dance forms Dwelling further into the process of developing it, Jayachandran explained how every dance style has some common fundamentals. "It's how students are taught general subjects until Class 10, regardless of their future career paths. Same way, this tool allows us to teach a common foundation for all dance forms — basic movements that train both the body and the mind to stay open to diverse dance styles," said the 46-year-old who taught dance for nine years at Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai before joining IIITH. While designed for basic dance education for beginners, he said that the interchangeable dials of Atam make it suitable for intermediate and advanced learners as well. But he never thought it would be so well received. "Forget the patent, I wasn't even trying to design a tool. All I wanted was to make my class more interactive. I wasn't trying to turn someone into a dancer, but to provide dance literacy," said Jayachandran, who was awarded a PhD this month on form-neutral and style-neutral fundamentals of dance. Niveditha Sathish, who has been using the tool since 2023 to teach students at Aham Divine Dance Foundation in Chennai, said, "I've tried this with all age groups, including non-dancers, and it's very engaging. For example, in Bharatanatyam, there are 64 traditional adavus. But with Atam, I can teach an infinite number of combinations as every time I roll a die or change the dial direction, I get a new set." Very rare feat Those working in the intellectual property field confirmed it is very rare to get a patent in arts. "Mostly, they go for copyrights. For instruments, tools, or devices used for music, dance, or other art forms, a patent can be secured, but it is very rare as it has to be a genuine invention rather than a trivial modification of an existing device," said Raju Bhupathiraju, an intellectual property expert who has been in the field for the last 20 years. The next step for Jayachandran is to develop an online tool based on Atam and make it available as an app. MSID:: 122905960 413 |
Time of India
21-04-2025
- Business
- Time of India
AI in Law: IIIT-Hyderabad team devises quick way to search for past judgments
1 2 Hyderabad: A novel approach devised by researchers from International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), to retrieve legal documents can now aid lawyers hunting for previous judgments to bolster their arguments. The IIIT-H team found that the text around legal citations in Supreme Court judgments can help computers better understand and retrieve important past cases. While many studies focus on using keywords, phrases, or paragraphs to improve legal searches, the IIIT-H team took a different approach. Led by Gaurang Patil and guided by PK Reddy, their research explored how the context around a citation – the words just before or after it – can improve search accuracy. Their study, "Citation Anchor Text for Improving Precedent Retrieval : An Experimental Study on Indian Legal Documents", was presented at the 37th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2024) in Czech Republic, where it won the Best Paper Award. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like If you have a mouse, play this game for 1 minute Navy Quest Undo "The idea came from the concept of anchor text – the clickable part of a hyperlink on websites or word documents," said Gaurang. "In the 90s and early 2000s, using anchor text helped improve the quality of web searches. We wanted to test if something similar could work in legal documents," he added. Using publicly available Supreme Court judgments, the team extracted and analysed the text surrounding citations of earlier cases from two existing datasets. "Our approach showed that leveraging the text around the citation helped create a better representation of the referenced judgment, which in turn improved the overall ability of AI systems to retrieve the right precedent," he added.
