Cloud Technology in the North

Abstract
LLM apps hide many ungoverned choices—prompts, retrieval, routing, decoding—making systems brittle and costly. We ask whether these apps are underspecified and show how to replace guesswork with optimization. The presentation and demos uncovers hidden parameter interactions, reads Pareto trade-offs (accuracy–cost–latency), and uses budget-aware exploration to find strong configurations with far fewer trials. We briefly situate these results in a specification-driven workflow for evaluation-driven agent development.

About the Speaker
Dr. Nimrod Busany is the founder of Traigent and a Senior Research Scientist. He previously led an applied AI research team at Accenture Labs and spent nearly seven years at IBM Research–Israel (Haifa & Givatayim). His work bridges knowledge graphs, ontologies, and LLM systems to improve reliability and efficiency of LLM applications; he holds a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, is an inventor on multiple patents with publications, and serves on program committees for leading software-engineering venues.

Abstract
OpenSearch has become a cornerstone of open source search and observability, empowering developers and organizations to derive meaningful insights from unstructured data at scale. OpenSearch's vector database supports trillions of vectors and tens of thousands of QPS. As a top-level project under The Linux Foundation, and backed by major brands such as AWS, Uber, IBM and SAP, the project is further cementing its position in the open source ecosystem and the industry at large.

In this session, OpenSearch Ambassador and chief evangelist Dotan Horovits will introduce OpenSearch fundamentals of how to integrate your foundation model of choice, store and process embeddings of various data modalities—whether text, images, audio, video or PDF documents—and use exact and approximate k-NN algorithms to calculate proximity. We'll look at the journey from lexical search to semantic search, and how OpenSearch combines both approaches in one complete package. We'll also see important updates from the V3 major release and recent updates around GPU acceleration, MCP servers, agentic AI and more.

About the Speaker
Horovits lives at the intersection of technology, product and open source. With over 20 years in the tech industry as a software developer, a solutions architect and a product manager, he brings a wealth of knowledge in cloud and cloud-native architectures, big data solutions, DevOps practices and more.
Horovits is an international speaker, an Ambassador of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and host of the popular OpenObservability Talks podcast. On the OpenSearch front, Horovits is an OpenSearch Ambassador under the Linux Foundation, he serves as a lead for the Observability technical advisory group, and is on the project’s outreach committee.
Horovits works as a senior developer advocate for the open source team at Amazon Web Services, with special focus on the OpenSearch project, open observability, and open source practices.