On September 9, London’s search community is coming together for a special evening dedicated to Search, Information Retrieval and AI.
This event is a collaboration between the London Information Retrieval & AI Meetup Group, the London Search & AI User Group and Vespa AI Live, bringing together three communities around a shared interest: exploring how search is evolving, from established Information Retrieval techniques to the latest AI-powered approaches.
in LONDON
Location: Lumiere London – 6-14 Underwood St · London
Date: 09th September 2026 | open doors from 6:30 PM (BST)
LONDON INFORMATION RETRIEVAL & AI MEETUP
PROGRAM
For this special edition, we’ll have three technical talks, each followed by time for questions and discussion.
> Open doors from
6:30 PM BST
> FIRST TALK
“Introducing Vector-Native Faceting” – Philippe Bouzaglou, Technical founder @ Vectra
> SECOND TALK
“Patterns from Shipped Migrations” – Ravindra Harige, Founder @Searchplex
> Talk #3
[coming soon…]
> Networking session + buffet
The event is free, but registration is required.
More details about speakers, talks and timing will be announced soon.
talk
Introducing Vector-Native Faceting
earch queries have long been a one-shot game. The user types in a query, presses “Search” and hopes to find what they were looking for. This pattern was dictated by technical constraints in the era of lexical search, but with vector search, we can remove this constraint and offer the user a much better search experience, where they can iterate and refine their query as they see the results that each step brings. The technical breakthrough that allows for query refinement in vector search is the creation of “control vectors”, which nudge the original query vector after each refinement step to create a final, composite vector incorporating the information from all the query refinements steps. We will demonstrate this technique in action on a e-commerce catalog, where the user can add facets to refine their search.
The speaker
Philippe Bouzaglou
Technical founder @ Vectra
Philippe pioneered the concept of the Social Graph while attending Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg. He is now the technical founder at Vectra, an AI company creating the foundation model for e-commerce search.
second talk
Patterns from Shipped Migrations
Migrating to Vespa means dealing with systems that have accumulated years of schema decisions, analyzers, filters, query DSL usage, ranking rules, business logic, and product-specific edge cases. The hard part is that these concerns are often tightly intertwined: schema design affects query behavior, query builders encode business rules, and ranking logic depends on both.
This talk shares patterns from shipped Vespa migrations across e-commerce and regulated-domain search systems, with examples involving saved searches and alerts, boolean logic, lexical matching, and vector signals. The talk includes a demo of tooling Searchplex is building to get teams to a working Vespa v0.1 faster.
The speaker
Ravindra Harige
Founder @ Searchplex
Ravindra is the founder of Searchplex, a firm focused on designing and building scalable AI-native retrieval and discovery systems across multiple industry verticals.
