Why Context Matters: Streaming Data, Semantic Search, and Agents

We’re excited to bring the community together for an evening of learning and connection. This time, we'll have a community member sharing a use case and, as usual, an Elastic employee sharing their expertise as well.

Come support your fellow developers, learn something new, and meet others who are passionate about search, observability, and security.

Date and Time:
Tuesday, February, 10th from 5:30-7:30 pm EDT

Location:
Elastic Arlington Office - 4100 Fairfax Drive, Ste 500, Arlington, VA 22203

Agenda:

• 5:30 pm: Doors open; say hi, grab a seat, and eat some food.
• 6:00 pm: "Streaming Context: Powering Semantic Search with Kafka and Elasticsearch", by Sandon Jacobs, Developer Advocate at Confluent
• 6:30 pm: Q&A
• 6:40 pm: "Agent Builder: Providing Relevant Context for Data Driven Agents", by Joe Gentsch, Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic
• 7:10 pm: Q&A
• 7:20-7:30 pm: Networking & refreshments

Talk Abstracts:

"Streaming Context: Powering Semantic Search with Kafka and Elasticsearch"

As the de facto platform for event streaming, we’ve seen how data from Apache Kafka can easily empower basic keyword search. But let's be real, modern semantic search applications need context to interpret the real meaning and intent of a user's query. We could wait around for the next batch job to kick off and provide that context... or we could serve it up in near real-time right from our data streams.
In this talk, we'll discuss how to leverage data streams from Kafka to power much smarter semantic search with Elasticsearch. We’ll follow a simple event from a Kafka topic and see how it transforms into a powerful vector embedding. Then, we’ll see this whole flow in action using a k-Nearest Neighbor search to instantly find similar items in milliseconds.

While my code examples will be in Java or Kotlin using the Spring Boot and Spring AI ecosystem, FEAR NOT! The core concepts—getting data into a vector format via a stream—are totally language agnostic. Join us to grab a few practical ideas you can take and use in your next project!

"Agent Builder: Providing Relevant Context for Data Driven Agents"

What are agents? What is context engineering? Join us as we dive into the importance of context engineering for providing relevant information to agents, and how to build grounded agents using Elastic Agent Builder.

Parking:

• The building’s parking garage is operated by Colonial Parking and is located off N. Randolph Street
• Book a spot on SpotHero
• A Metro Station is located across the street