Alessandro Benedetti is the founder of Sease.
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.
Following his passion he entered the Apache Lucene and Solr world in 2010 becoming an active member of the community.
When he isn’t developing a new search solution he is presenting the applications of leading edge techniques in real world scenarios at conferences such as ECIR,  Lucene/Solr Revolution, Apachecon and Open Source Summit.

Specialties : (Semantic) Search Engines, Apache Lucene/Solr, Machine Learning
Open Source : Apache Lucene/Solr contributor, Apache ManifoldCF committer, RankLib committer
Current Research Topics : Document Similarity, Learning To Rank, User Behaviour Logging, Query Expansion

Andrea Gazzarini is a curious software engineer, mainly focused on the Java language and Search technologies.
With more than 15 years of experience in various software engineering areas, his adventure with the search domain began in 2010, when he met Apache Solr and later Elasticsearch... and it was love at first sight.
Since then, he has been involved in many projects across different fields (bibliographic, e-government, e-commerce, geospatial).

In 2015 he wrote "Apache Solr Essentials", a book about Solr, published by Packt Publishing.
He's an opensource lover; he's currently involved in several (too many!) projects, always thinking about a "big" idea that will change his (developer) life.

Specialties: Apache Lucene/Solr, Elasticsearch, Scalable indexing pipelines (Apache Kafka, Apache Storm), Enterprise Integration Patterns, Object Oriented Design & Programming, Functional Programming, Test Driven Development
Open Source: Apache Qpid committer, CumulusRDF committer
Current Research Topics: Text Information Retrieval, Music similarity, Ranking Evaluation

Elia is a Software Engineer passionate about algorithms and data structures concerning search engines and efficiency.
He is currently involved in many research projects at CNR (National Research Council, Italy ) and for personal purpose.
Previously he worked in Intecs and List where he could experience different fields and levels of computer science, by handling low level programming problems such as embedded and networking up to high level trading algorithms.
He graduated with a dissertation about data compression and query performance on search engines.
He is active part of the information retrieval research community, attending international conferences such as SIGIR and ECIR.
His most recent pubblication is : FASTER BLOCKMAX WAND WITH VARIABLE-SIZED BLOCKS SIGIR 2017 Proceedings of the 40th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2017.

Specialties : Search engines algorithms
Open Source : Apache Lucene/Solr passionate
Current Research Topics : Compression algorithms, Information retrieval systems efficiency

Rafa Haro is a software engineer interested not only in design and development, but also in applied research.
He considers himself an enthusiast of anything related to Semantic Technologies, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Text Mining and Heterogeneous Data Sources Integration.
When he faces a problem, he approaches it in two stages: find a state-of-the-art solution and code it.
Rafa has a strong experience in many technologies such as Apache Lucene/Solr, GATE, OpenNLP, Apache Mahout, WEKA, Scikit-learn, Spark, and Hadoop. He's also an Apache Software Foundation committer, currently contributing to Apache Stanbol and Apache ManifoldCF.

Specialties : (Semantic) Search Engines, Natural Language Processing
Open Source : Apache Stanbol committer, Apache ManifoldCF committer
Current Research Topics : Entity disambiguation