We are pleased to announce the eighth London Information Retrieval Meetup, a free evening meetup aimed to Information Retrieval passionates and professionals who are curious to explore and discuss the latest trends in the field.
This time we go fully remote, given the COVID-19 situation and the impossibility of hosting the event live.
The evening will be structured with 2 technical talks, with Q&A session after each talk.
After a short welcome & latest news speech from our Founder Alessandro Benedetti, we will proceed to the first talk.
first talk
Explainability for learning to Rank
In the last few years, Artificial Intelligence applications have become more and more sophisticated and often operate like algorithmic “black boxes” for decision-making. Due to this fact, some questions naturally arise when working with these models: why should we trust a certain decision taken by these algorithms? Why and how was this prediction made? Which variables mostly influenced the prediction? The most crucial challenge with complex machine learning models is therefore their interpretability and explainability. This talk aims to illustrate an overview of the most popular explainability techniques and their application in Learning to Rank. In particular, we will examine in depth a powerful library called SHAP with both theoretical and practical insights; we will talk about its amazing tools to give an explanation of the model behaviour, especially how each feature impacts the model’s output, and we will explain to you how to interpret the results in a Learning to Rank scenario.
the speakers
Anna Ruggero
R&D SOFTWARE ENGINEER @ SEASE
Anna Ruggero is a software engineer passionate about Information Retrieval and Data Mining.
She loves to find new solutions to problems, suggesting and testing new ideas, especially those that concern the integration of machine learning techniques into information retrieval systems.
Ilaria Petreti
R&D SOFTWARE ENGINEER @ SEASE
Ilaria is a Data Scientist passionate about the world of Artificial Intelligence. She loves applying Data Mining and Machine Learnings techniques, strongly believing in the power of Big Data and Digital Transformation.
slides
video
second talk
The Split: Introduction and Discussion about Apache Lucene and Solr as Separate Top-Level Projects
the speakers
Jan Høydahl
Apache Solr PMC Chair
Jan is an Apache Lucene/Solr committer, PMC member and Apache member, and has more than 24 years of professional experience within IT and Telecom. He was FAST’s 2nd professional service consultant in 2000. Jan runs the consulting company Cominvent AS, delivering consulting services and training within mission critical and large scale search.
Throughout his career, Jan had deep experience in training, software development, IT architecture, technical sales support, senior consulting, entrepreneur, CTO and manager.
Michael Sokolov
Apache Lucene PMC Chair
Sokolov is a Software Engineer with a diverse background, currently at Amazon building its new product search service using Lucene. He has built many search-based applications for the reference and academic publishing industry such as Oxford English Dictionary, DeGruyter Online, and O’Reilly Safari Books, using a wide variety of search engine technologies, and is a contributor to the Apache Lucene project.
