Re-Ranking: The 20-Minute RAG Quality Boost

Hosted by Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

Fri, Jul 3, 2026

9:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp & Certificate
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

Why the first results miss

How initial retrieval ranks passages roughly, and why the best one often is not on top.

Add re-ranking in minutes

Drop a re-ranking step into a working RAG and watch the strongest passages rise first.

See the answer improve

A before and after on the same question so the lift from re-ranking is plain to see.

Why this topic matters

Your RAG pulls back ten passages and the best one is buried at number seven, so the answer suffers. Re-ranking fixes exactly that, and it is one of the cheapest wins in the whole pipeline. In this free 30 minute session you add a re-ranking step to a working RAG and watch the most relevant passages climb to the top before the answer is written. We run the same query with and without re-ranking and compare what the model sees. You leave able to add re-ranking to your own RAG and feel the answers sharpen.

You'll learn from

Aki Wijesundara

AI Advisor | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

Manu Jayawardana

AI Founder | Co-Founder & CEO at Krybe | Co-Founder of Snapdrum

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes.

He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.

Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.

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