// the importance of sharing ideas
Conferences attended
In Sease we are strong believer in the importance of technical conferences in the Information Retrieval field.
They are the perfect place to expand your skills and learn industry specific knowledge that can help search experts grow.
As speakers at most of the biggest conferences around the world, we deeply care about sharing our researches and ideas in various topics: from search quality evaluation to artificial intelligence in search and machine learning integrations.
Here you can find all the conferences we attended during the years, with info about our talks and speakers (with slides and video).
London Information Retrieval Meetup
We proudly run the London Information Retrieval Meetup, a free evening aimed to Information Retrieval passionates and professionals who are curious to explore and discuss the latest trends in the field.
Some of the latest conferences attended
Please see below for a chronological listing of all of them.
2025
BERLIN BUZZWORDS
Location: Berlin, Germany
Date: 15-17 June 2025
Speaker: Anna Ruggero + Ilaria Petreti + Alessandro Benedetti
Talks:
1. AI-Powered Search Results Navigation with LLMs & JSON Schema
2. End-to-End Semantic Search with Apache Solr 9.8 LLM Module
2024
search solutions - bcs
Location: London, UK
Date: 26 – 27 Nov 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: What I don’t like about RAG: can we do better?
Solr Meetup japan
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Date: 16th Oct 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Hybrid Search With Apache Solr Reciprocal Rank Fusion
SDMX Expert Workshop
Location: Amsterdam
Date: 7-11 October 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Large Language Models and SDMX: From Natural Language to Structured Stats Navigation
ALGOLIA DEVCON
Location: Virtual
Date: 2-3 October 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Panel on RAG (retrieval augmented generation)
BERLIN BUZZWORDS
Location: Berlin, Germany
Date: 9-11 June 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti + Anna Ruggero + Ilaria Petreti + Daniele Antuzi
Talks:
1. Hybrid Search With Apache Solr Reciprocal Rank Fusion
2. From Natural Language To Structured Solr Queries Using LLMs
3. Blazing-Fast Serverless MapReduce Indexer For Apache Solr
Community Over Code EU
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Date: 3-5 June 2024
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Hybrid Search With Apache Solr
2023
Solr Meetup japan
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Date: 1st Dec 2023
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: How To Integrate Open Source Large Language With Apache Solr
search solutions - bcs
Location: London, UK
Date: 21 – 22 Nov 2023
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: How Large Language Models Can Improve Your Search Project
sdmx gc
Location: Manama, Bahrain
Date: 29 Oct – 2 Nov 2023
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: When SDMX meets AI: Leveraging open source LLMs to make official statistics more accessible and discoverable
community over code
Location: Halifax, Canada
Date: 7-10th October 2023
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Introducing Multi-valued Vector Fields in Apache Lucene
berlin buzzwords
Location: Berlin, Germany
Date: 18-20th June 2023
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Anna Ruggero and Ilaria Petreti
Talks: Introducing Multi-valued Vector Fields in Apache Lucene +
How to Implement Online Search Quality Evaluation with Kibana
ecir
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Date: 2-6th April 2023
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Anna Ruggero
Talk: Stat-weight: Improving the Estimator of Interleaved Methods Outcomes with Statistical Hypothesis Testing
elasticon
Location: Online
Date: 7-9th March 2023
Speakers: Anna Ruggero + Ilaria Petreti
Talk: How To Implement Your Online Search Quality Evaluation With Kibana
2022
lucene/solr meetup tokyo
Location: Tokyo – Japan
Date: 9th December 2022
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Online Testing Learning to Rank with Apache Solr Interleaving
open source summit japan
Location: Yokohama – Japan
Date: 5-6 December 2022
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Neural Search Improvements with Apache Solr 9.1: Approximate Nearest Neighbor and Pre-Filtering
BCS Search Solutions
Location: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
25 Copthall Avenue, London
Date: 22-23 November 2022
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Approaching Neural Search with Apache Solr and Open-source Technologies – Tutorial
Apachecon north america
Location: Canal Street, New Orleans
Date: 3-6 October 2022
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Neural Search Comes to Apache Solr: Approximate Nearest Neighbor, BERT and More!
Melbourne Search and Recommendation
Location: online
Date: 29th June 2022
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Dense Retrieval with Apache Solr Neural Search
Berlin Buzzwords 2022
Location: Kulturbrauerei, Berlin
Date: 12-14 June 2022
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Daniele Antuzi + Ilaria Petreti
Talk 1: Neural Search Comes to Apache Solr: Approximate Nearest Neighbor, BERT and More (Buzzwords)!
Talk 2: Word2Vec Model to Generate Synonyms on the Fly in Apache Lucene
ecir 2022
Location: Stavanger
Date: 10-14 April 2022
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Elia Porciani + Anna Ruggero
Poster 1: Dense Retrieval with Apache Solr Neural Search
Poster 2: Evaluating Ranking Models in Production: a View on Offline and Online Experiences
haystack live!
Location: online
Date: 24th March 2022
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Online Testing Learning to Rank with Solr Interleaving
2021
Chorus workshops
Location: Plain Schwarz (online)
Date: 26th January 2021
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Andrea Gazzarini
Talk: Rated Ranking Evaluator – Hands-on Relevance Testing
2020
HAYSTACK LIVE!
Location: online
Date: 21th May 2020
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: How to Build your Training Set for a Learning to Rank Project
2019
Apache Lucene/Solr meetup
Location: London (UK)
Date: 16th May 2019
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: How the Lucene More Like This Works
HAYSTACK
Location: Charlottesville (USA)
Date: 24th April 2019
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Andrea Gazzarini
Talk: Rated Ranking Evaluator: an Open-source Approach for Search Quality Evaluation
ECIR 2019
Location: Cologne (Germany)
Date: 14-18 April 2019
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Search Quality Evaluation to Help Reproducibility: an Open-source Approach
FOSDEM 2019
Location: Bruxelles (Belgium)
Date: 2-3 February 2019
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Andrea Gazzarini
Talk: Rated Ranking Evaluator: an Open-source Approach for Search Quality Evaluation
2018
HAYSTACK
Location: Haystack (UK)
Date: 2nd October 2018
Speakers: Alessandro Benedetti + Andrea Gazzarini
Talk: Search Quality Evaluation: Tools and Techniques
ecir 2018
Location: Grenoble (France)
Date: 26-29 March 2018
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: From Academic Papers to Production: A Learning To Rank Story
Apache Lucene/Solr meetup
Location: London (UK)
Date: //
Speaker: Andrea Gazzarini
Talk: Search Quality Evaluation: a Developer Perspective
2017
Open Source summit japan
Location: Tokyo (Japan)
Date: 31th May – 2nd June 2017
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Advanced Document Similarity with Apache Lucene
Apache Lucene/Solr Meetup
Location: London (UK)
Date: //
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Apache Lucene/Solr Document Classification
2016
Apachecon 2016
Location: Seville (Spain)
Date: 16-18 November 2016
Speaker: Alessandro Benedetti
Talk: Lucene And Solr Document Classification