On Wednesday last week I had the privilege of co-organising the 18th Search Solutions conference, held at BCS London. As in previous years, the event included presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging topics in search and information retrieval. And in keeping with tradition, we were delighted to be able to announce the winners of this year’s BCS Search Industry Awards. In a special session held at the end of Search Solution 2023, it was my honour to announce the winners for the following categories:
- Most promising start-up goes to 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 goes to 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 is 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 everyday!
- Best presentation at Search Solutions (as voted for by the audience) goes to Charlie Hull for his presentation on “Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid”.
Congratulations to all our winners!
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our judging panel:
They did a remarkably thorough job of evaluating a highly competitive field with many strong submissions. I hope that winners share my view that this makes their awards all the more special.
We’ll be updating the IRSG website with this news shortly. Next year we hope to offer a similar set of awards but we are open to suggestions for new ideas and categories. If you’d like to contribute, just drop us a line.
Nominations for next year’s awards will open early in the new year. As with this year’s awards, we are happy to accept nominations from a 3rd party or self-nominations. Good luck!
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