SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lucidworks, leader in AI-powered search, today announced keynote programs for their annual ACTIVATE Search and AI Conference, taking place September 9-12 in Washington, D.C. at the historic Washington Hilton.
This year’s ACTIVATE keynote speakers include Mike Gualtieri, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, on Wednesday, September 11th, and Dr. Kamelia Aryafar, Chief Customer and Algorithms Officer at Overstock.com, and Arun Gupta, Principal Open Source Technologist at Amazon Web Services, on September 12th.
Gualtieri will discuss practical applications for AI and provide insights to enterprise leaders and key implementers that are charged with moving AI forward in their organization. Dr. Aryafar will share best practices on building successful AI teams and an experiment-driven culture, including how Overstock.com approaches search and machine learning and how she sees the field evolving. Gupta will speak about Amazon’s commitment to open source, how it plans to grow open distro, and what that means for developers worldwide.
“We’re looking forward to hearing these industry leaders’ unique perspectives on how search and AI can contribute to an effective digital transformation strategy,” explains Will Hayes, Lucidworks CEO. “ACTIVATE has been one of the world’s largest gatherings for Solr developers and we’re proud to expand the scope of the conference as the use cases for search and AI continue to grow.”
On Wednesday, September 11th, a cross-industry panel will explore, “The Many Faces of Digital Transformation, Through the Prism of Search and AI,” featuring Ted Borroum, Executive Director, Morgan Stanley; Jeff Ely, Director/Chief Product Owner - HR and IT Employee Experience, Intel; Jon Gifford, Senior Staff Engineer - Machine Learning, Reddit; Juan Paul Ramirez, CTO, Goop; and Daisy Urfer, Partner Alliance Manager, Onix.
Then on Thursday, September 12th, some of the largest Solr shops take the mainstage to discuss deploying Solr at scale, including Kamelia Aryafar, Chief Customer and Algorithms Officer, Overstock.com; Jesjit Birak, Senior Engineering Manager, Reddit; Gennadiy Geyfman, VP, Software Engineering, Salesforce; and Ken LaPorte, Search Infrastructure Team Lead, Bloomberg.
ACTIVATE 2019 will also feature the addition of a new competition evaluating cutting-edge AI projects from both the ecommerce space and the digital enterprise. The competition will celebrate novel uses of AI from companies such as Uber, a leading sportswear retailer, a major professional services firm, and others. Judging for the competition will be representatives from leading technology analyst firms, including Sheryl Kingstone from 451 Research and Mike Gualtieri from Forrester, as well as American Inno’s New Market Editor, Kieran Mcquilkin.
The full conference agenda can be found here.
Registration for ACTIVATE is ongoing. Interested in attending? Go here for registration and more information on the ACTIVATE Search and AI Conference.
About ACTIVATE
The ACTIVATE Conference brings together the brightest minds in search, AI, data science, and analytics from innovative organizations creating rich digital experiences. ACTIVATE is organized by Lucidworks and began in 2010 as Lucene Revolution, which grew into Lucene/Solr Revolution, an event dedicated to bringing together the Apache Solr open source community. As search continued to converge with AI and related technologies, the event relaunched as ACTIVATE in 2018 with an expanded program including both open source Apache Solr and complementary technologies at the intersection of Search and AI.
About Lucidworks
Lucidworks builds AI-powered search solutions for many of the world's largest brands. Fusion, Lucidworks' advanced development platform, provides the enterprise-grade capabilities needed to design, develop, and deploy intelligent search applications at any scale. Companies across all industries, from consumer retail and healthcare to insurance and financial services, rely on Lucidworks every day to power their consumer-facing and enterprise search apps. Lucidworks’ investors include Francisco Partners, TPG Sixth Street Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Silver Lake Waterman, and Walden International. Learn more at Lucidworks.com.