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At Berlin Buzzwords, industry voices highlighted how search is evolving with AI and LLMs.

• Kacper Łukawski (Qdrant) stressed hybrid search (semantic + keyword) as core for RAG systems and promoted efficient embedding models for smaller-scale use.
• Manish Gill (ClickHouse) discussed auto-scaling OLAP databases on Kubernetes, combining infrastructure and database knowledge.
• André Charton (Kleinanzeigen) reflected on scaling search for millions of classifieds, moving from Solr/Elasticsearch toward vector search, while returning to a hands-on technical role.
• Filip Makraduli (Superlinked) introduced a vector-first framework that fuses multiple encoders into one representation for nuanced e-commerce and recommendation search.
• Brian Goldin (Voyager Search) emphasized spatial context in retrieval, combining geospatial data with AI enrichment to add the “where” to search.
• Atita Arora (Voyager Search) highlighted geospatial AI models, the renewed importance of retrieval in RAG, and the cautious but promising rise of AI agents.

Together, their perspectives show a common thread: search is regaining center stage in AI—scaling, hybridization, multimodality, and domain-specific enrichment are shaping the next generation of retrieval systems.

Kacper Łukawski Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant, he educates users on vector and hybrid search. He highlighted Qdrant’s support for dense and sparse vectors, the role of search with LLMs, and his interest in cost-effective models like static embeddings for smaller companies and edge apps. Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacperlukawski/

Manish Gill
Engineering Manager at ClickHouse, he spoke about running ClickHouse on Kubernetes, tackling auto-scaling and stateful sets. His team focuses on making ClickHouse scale automatically in the cloud. He credited its speed to careful engineering and reflected on the shift from IC to manager.
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manishgill/

André Charton
Head of Search at Kleinanzeigen, he discussed shaping the company’s search tech—moving from Solr to Elasticsearch and now vector search with Vespa. Kleinanzeigen handles 60M items, 1M new listings daily, and 50k requests/sec. André explained his career shift back to hands-on engineering.
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrecharton/

Filip Makraduli
Founding ML DevRel engineer at Superlinked, an open-source framework for AI search and recommendations. Its vector-first approach fuses multiple encoders (text, images, structured fields) into composite vectors for single-shot retrieval. His Berlin Buzzwords demo showed e-commerce search with natural-language queries and filters.
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipmakraduli/

Brian Goldin
Founder and CEO of Voyager Search, which began with geospatial search and expanded into documents and metadata enrichment. Voyager indexes spatial data and enriches pipelines with NLP, OCR, and AI models to detect entities like oil spills or windmills. He stressed adding spatial context (“the where”) as critical for search and highlighted Voyager’s 12 years of enterprise experience.
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-goldin-04170a1/

Atita Arora
Director of AI at Voyager Search, with nearly 20 years in retrieval systems, now focused on geospatial AI for Earth observation data. At Berlin Buzzwords she hosted sessions, attended talks on Lucene, GPUs, and Solr, and emphasized retrieval quality in RAG systems. She is cautiously optimistic about AI agents and values the event as both learning hub and professional reunion.
Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atitaarora/

*** RSVP: https://www.aicamp.ai/event/eventdetails/W2024020709 (Due to room capacity, you must pre-register at the link for admission)

Welcome to the monthly in-person AI meetup in Berlin. Join us for deep dive tech talks on AI, GenAI, LLMs and machine learning, networking with speakers and fellow developers.

Agenda: * 6:00pm\~7:00pm: Checkin and networking * 7:00pm\~9:00pm: Tech talks and Q&A * 9:00pm: Open discussion and Mixer

Tech Talk: Chain of Thought Algorithm to Analyse and Attack Legal Arguments Speaker: Viktor von Essen (Libra) Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities of building AI applications in the legal space, and present first use-cases.

Tech Talk: Bridging Gaps in RAG Evaluation Speaker: Atita Arora (Qdrant) Abstract: Evaluating applications using LLMs, such as RAG, is pivotal for confidence and improvement, yet faces challenges like subjectiveness with respect to domain-specific suitability .This presentation covers essential aspects to assess and optimize RAG performance.

Speakers/Topics: Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules. If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: Submit Topics

Sponsors: We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community. Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will have the chance to speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, and gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 8,000+ local or 300K+ developers worldwide.

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We talked about:

Atita’s background How NLP relates to search Atita’s experience with Lucidworks and OpenSource Connections Atita’s experience with Qdrant and vector databases Utilizing vector search Major changes to search Atita has noticed throughout her career RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Building a chatbot out of transcripts with LLMs Ingesting the data and evaluating the results Keeping humans in the loop Application of vector databases for machine learning Collaborative filtering Atita’s resource recommendations

Links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atitaarora/
Twitter: https://x.com/atitaarora Github: https://github.com/atarora Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning: https://www.manning.com/books/human-in-the-loop-machine-learning Relevant Search: https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search Let's learn about Vectors: https://hub.superlinked.com/ Langchain: https://python.langchain.com/docs/get_started/introduction Qdrant blog: https://blog.qdrant.tech/ OpenSource Connections Blog: https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/

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Search technologies, challenges, and dealing with large data sets - Atita Arora

About the event

Outline:

• Atita’s journey into search
• Search technologies, challenges, and dealing with large data sets
• NLP, voice, and personalization in search
• Scaling and evaluating search technologies

About the speaker:

Atita Arora is a seasoned and esteemed professional shaping the landscape of information retrieval systems. With a robust background spanning from her impactful contributions as a committer in various information retrieval and relevancy workbench projects including Apache OpenNLP and Quepid, to her insightful blogs on leveraging vectors in e-commerce search and an open source implementation called Chorus to pair with. Her commitment to calibrating the essence of "good" in information retrieval systems through OTB metrics and user-centric approaches reflects her dedication to enhancing user experiences. As a fervent believer in diversity and inclusion, Atita actively champions initiatives to foster inclusivity in search and data science. She's a proud Women of Search Group representative and a member of various DEI forums, striving to create a more inclusive environment in tech. Currently immersed in groundbreaking research on evaluating RAGs, Atita continues to drive innovation and positive change in information retrieval while advocating for diversity, making her a true trailblazer in technology and inclusivity. ​

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