talk-data.com

This month we’re delighted to be joined by Tesco’s Head of Data and we’ll also hear about the latest in AI Governance on Databricks from the Advancing Analytics team!

17:30 - 18:00: Arrival & Networking 18:00 - 18:10: Opening Remarks & Introductions

18:10 - 18:40: Building Sustainable Data Products with AI Readiness at Scale for Cyber - Varun S Gangoor - Head of Data at Tesco In this session, we’ll explore how sustainable data product design can enable AI readiness and drive innovation in cybersecurity. We’ll look at the key principles behind building scalable, secure and reusable data products that support cyber analytics, machine learning and GenAI use cases at scale. We’ll also discuss practical approaches to data governance, automation and platform engineering that help cyber teams turn data into actionable intelligence and strengthen overall cyber resilience.

18.40-19.10 Governing AI In Databricks: Building Trust And Compliance At Scale - Gavi Regunath, Advancing Analytics CAIO and Databricks MVP, joined by Terry McCann, Advancing Analytics CEO AI governance isn’t optional - it’s foundational. With 45% of organisations concerned about data accuracy and bias, and 40% worried about privacy, the need for robust oversight is clear. From model safety to compliance tooling, we’ll show how to embed trust into your AI systems, without slowing innovation.

19:00 onwards: Pizza, Drinks & Networking Enjoy some delicious pizza and beverages while networking with peers.

Join us for a fantastic evening of learning and networking at the London Databricks meetup!

We're hosted this time by Tesco. The event will start at 6.30pm and finish by 9pm, with food and drinks available. This will be an in-person event (but we will try to record the talks and share the videos later).

Our first talk will come from our hosts Tesco by Max Grogan (Data Scientist) and George Sykes (Senior Data Science Engineer): Judgement Day: Rethinking Search Evaluation with Language Models "Relevance labels are the backbone of evaluating search performance, yet human labelling is slow, costly, and hard to scale. This talk explores how LLMs can act as automated judges, producing scalable, human-like labels for ecommerce search. We’ll examine our learnings from trying to build such a system including building reliable evaluation datasets as well as the trade-offs of adopting different model and system architectures.".

The second talk will come from Bharav Patel (Specialist Solution Architect , OpenSearch, AWS): Query understanding with LLM : Approaches and Optimization in OpenSearch. "Ever wondered how to make your OpenSearch smarter with LLMs? This session dives into how Large Language Models are revolutionizing search and making it way more intuitive for users. We'll walk through the AI-powered search lifecycle and show you how LLMs can supercharge different parts of your search system:

• Query Understanding: Help your search actually "get" what users are looking for, even when they don't phrase things perfectly
• Query Rewriting: Smart techniques to rephrase and expand queries so you catch more relevant results
• Result Reranking: Use ML models to bubble up the best results to the top (because nobody likes digging through page 2)
• Context-Aware Search: Make search feel personalized by understanding user context and preferences

Learn practical tips and real optimization strategies for implementing these LLM features in OpenSearch, whether you're building a new search experience from scratch or improving an existing one to make it smarter and more user-friendly."

We'll also make time for Q&A on all things search and AI and some general networking. Our Search Meetup is organised by The Search Juggler, OpenSearch and Eliatra.

Please provide your full name and email address when registering for the event as we will need a list of attendees for security.