Pre-Haystack US Meetup at Center for Open Science

Join us the evening before Haystack at the Center for Open Science based in the Omni Hotel at one end of the Charlottesville Downtown Mall. We've got a couple of talks planned:

• Matt Clark on COS, whose mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research, and their SCORE project: Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence
• René Kriegler, Director, E-commerce Search at Open Source Connections: A path to understanding and adopting evolving technologies in search :
  Many search practitioners are currently wondering how they should approach emerging technologies like vector search or AI chatbots. The capabilities of these technologies seem impressive and within the search community there is an increasing sentiment of missing out and falling behind competitors amongst those who don't adopt these technologies. On the other hand, how can a team know if it was worthwhile adopting them and how could they get started?

In this talk, I shall argue that teams should focus on understanding the user needs and the use case for which these new technologies could provide a solution in order to understand whether and how the technological solution would be a fit. This implies that they will have to measure success and iterate on experiments right from the beginning. I will also demonstrate vector search in Chorus - an open source template application for e-commerce search - and line out how this supports an experimental exploration of vector search. It starts from the most commonly used open source technologies and thus allows search teams to focus on understanding quickly how the new technologies might apply to their use cases before they eventually integrate new softwares and services.

We'll also have some pizza & drinks. Places are limited.