_ Lisa Biella

London Information Retrieval Meetup [October 2023]

We are delighted to announce the eighteenth London Information Retrieval Meetup, a free evening event aimed at Information Retrieval enthusiasts and professionals who are curious to explore and discuss the latest trends in the field.

This time the Meetup is ON TRAVEL, with a live event in Milan (Italy) being streamed online on Zoom!

ATTENTION
Remember to fill out the form to confirm the registration

FILL OUT THE FORM

// in-presence

HUAWEI ITALIA
Via Lorenteggio, 240, 20147 (Tower A, second floor)
Milan, ITALY

Date: 23rd October 2023
Open Doors 5:30 PM GMT+1 (6:30 PM Italian Time)
Event starts at 6:00 PM GMT+1 (7:00 PM Italian Time)

// online

Location: Zoom [You will receive the link after the registration]

Date: 23rd October 2023 | 6:15 PM GMT+1 (7:15 Italian Time)

// LONDON INFORMATION RETRIEVAL MEETUP

PROGRAM

The event will be structured around 3 technical talks, each followed by a Q&A session. The event will end with a networking session.

> Open doors from 5:30 GMT+1 (in-presence) – Italian time: 6:30 PM
> 6:15 GMT+1 open doors for virtual attendees – Italian time: 7:15 PM

Welcome & Latest News – Alessandro Benedetti Founder, Sease
Huawei Intro – Luca Frigerio, Online Marketing Manager @ Huawei
Huawei Cloud – Francesco Stranieri, Developer Advocate @ Huawei Cloud

> 6:30 GMT+1 First talk – Open Source Large Language Models in Search | Alessandro Benedetti – Founder @ Sease
> 7:00 GMT+1 Second talk – GenerativeAI with Apache Solr and LangStream.ai | Enrico Olivelli – Senior Software Engineer @ DataStax
> 7:30 GMT+1 Third talk – A Deep Dive into Personalized Information Retrieval | Pranav Kasela – PhD Student @ Università Milano-Bicocca

> 8:00 GMT+1 Huawei presents ModelArts – Simple tooling for your AI | Francesco Stranieri – Developer Advocate @ Huawei Cloud

> 8:15 GMT+1 Networking session + buffet

// first talk

Open Source Large Language Models in Search

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming ubiquitous: everyone is talking about them, everyone wants to use them and everyone claims is getting benefits out of them…

But… is it that simple?

This talk aims to demystify the Open Source landscape of large language models, exploring what it means to use them to improve your search engine ecosystem and what are the most common pitfalls.

Join us as we explore this new exciting Open Source landscape and learn how you can leverage it to improve your search experience!

// speaker

Alessandro Benedetti

DIRECTOR @ SEASE
R&D SOFTWARE ENGINEER

APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER

APACHE SOLR PMC MEMBER

Senior Search Software Engineer, his focus is on R&D in Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.
He firmly believes in Open Source as a way to build a bridge between Academia and Industry and facilitate the progress of applied research.

// VIDEO

// second talk

GenerativeAI with Apache Solr and LangStream.ai

Everybody is talking about Generative AI, but it is hard to find good answers for people who want to build real applications that can run in production. In this talk, we will discuss the basic concepts of Generative AI, like LLMs and Vector Search, and then we will see how to practically build an application such as a chatbot with LangStream.ai and Apache Solr that runs on Kubernetes.

// speaker

Enrico Olivelli

Senior Software Engineer @ DATASTAX

Enrico Olivelli is an Open Source enthusiast. He is involved in many projects in the Apache Software Foundation and in CNCF.
He has been working on distributed systems, in particular databases and messaging systems.

He works at DataStax in the Luna Streaming team, in particular on Apache Pulsar and LangStream.ai.

// third talk

A Deep Dive into Personalized Information Retrieval

Personalization in Information Retrieval is a problem studied by the research community since a long time. It aims to tailor the search outcome to a specific user (or group of users) based on the knowledge of her/his interests and online behavior. Recent advances in Deep Neural Networks have proved their ability to face tasks related to natural language processing and to extract relevant features from either texts and structured sources.

In this talk we will explore the innovative utilization of Deep Neural Networks in the development of Personalized Information Retrieval systems. Through this talk, we aim to highlight the significant progress and novel insights emerging from our ongoing research, at University of Milano-Bicocca, in the evolving landscape of Personalized Information Retrieval.

// speaker

Pranav Kasela

PhD Student @ Università Milano-Bicocca

His research interest revolves around the application of Neural Models in information retrieval systems, recommender systems, and various NLP tasks.

Currently, he is pursuing his PhD under the supervision of Gabriella Pasi (University of Milano-Bicocca) and Raffaele Perego (ISTI-CNR, Pisa). The PhD focuses on Personalization in Information Retrieval.

// presentation

Huawei presents ModelArts - Simple tooling for your AI

Huawei Cloud finally approached Europe coming with ModelArts among many other cloud services! ModelArts is a one-stop AI development platform geared toward developers and data scientists of all skill levels. It enables you to rapidly develop, build, train, and deploy models anywhere, and manage full-lifecycle AI workflows supporting mainstream open-source AI development frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MindSpore.

// speaker

FRANCESCO STRANIERI

Developer Advocate @ Huawei Cloud

With several years as Developer Advocate for Huawei Mobile Services, He’s now on Huawei Cloud (EU) services, supporting developers, communities and events. As ML enthusiast, coming with a bright past on ML Kit from Huawei Mobile Services, He’s now focusing on ModelArts from Huawei Cloud, regularly playing with Jupyter Notebooks.

ATTENTION
Remember to fill out the form to confirm the registration

FILL OUT THE FORM

// VIDEO

// slides

// VIDEO

Author

Lisa Biella

Lisa Biella is a creative digital marketer, geek at heart who is enthusiastic about technology and how it affects people’s lives.

London Information Retrieval Meetup [October 2023]

PROGRAM