Looking back and looking ahead: Search Solutions and Industry Awards
By Meg Gordon (Natural Language Processing, Parsers, and LangSec (Language-Theoretic Security) specialist software developer and researcher)
In 2023, I attended BCS Search Solutions for the first time. I’ve known the organizers for many years through the London Text Analytics meetup group. On several past occasions the meetup group members were invited to the after conference networking events, but I’d never gone to the conference itself. In 2023, I had the opportunity to attend the full conference, and found it to be a friendly and informative small conference well worth my time.
Alongside a full day of informative presentations and panel discussions (see Figure 1), the Search Solutions conference also featured the presentation of the BCS Search Industry Awards, presented by the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group.
In his introduction to the awards, presenter Tony Russell-Rose told us the Search Industry Awards were founded a few years ago to fill a gap in the awards available. The IRSG is involved in a few awards focused more on academia, but the IRSG membership has a high number of industry practitioners. Through the creation of this set of awards, the community can recognize and celebrate the contributions and achievements of people and organizations in industry as well as academia.
In 2023, there were 4 categories in the awards. Three that were nominated in advance and judged by panel, and one — Best Presentation at Search Solutions 2023 — that was voted on by the attendees on the day. We were given three votes each to spread amongst our favourite talks. A good thing, as otherwise we’d have had the difficult task of narrowing it down to just one choice out of a full day of excellent talks! As Tony said, “share the love.”
The Categories and winners for the 2023 Search Industry Awards were:
Most promising start-up: batteryincluded.ai, the first BI Product Discovery Framework including 3 pillars for highest relevancy within global product listings (Suggest, Category Merchandising, SERPs).
Best open-source project: Wikiframe Visual Graph (University of Nevada, Las Vegas / Darnelle Melvin). Wikiframe VG (Visual Graph) provides a search capability for Special Collections data stored on Wikidata (wikidata.org).
Search Professional of the Year: Amey Porobo Dharwadker. As a Machine Learning Tech Lead Manager at Meta (Facebook), his work has had a profound impact on one of the world’s largest video recommender systems, benefiting over two billion users globally.
Best presentation at Search Solutions 2023: Charlie Hull for his presentation “Pragmatic AI-powered Search — Keeping it Simple, not Stupid”.
Charlie’s was a well deserved win, in a strong field of contenders; every presentation all day long held my interest. His presentation was informative, thoughtful, and entertaining. I’ve seen him talk a few times now, and he’s an engaging speaker every time — Search Solutions 2023 was no exception.
So that was last year, now it’s 2024, and time to start considering who to nominate for the Search Industry Awards 2024. They will be given out at Search Solutions 2024, and the categories the similar to 2023, with the exception that Best Project is all projects, both open source or otherwise. Nominations are open until Oct 31, 2024. Go forth and nominate people and projects you think are worthy of attention and celebration! Self nominations are encouraged too, don’t be shy.
More information on nominating for this year’s awards can be found here.
