Search Solutions 2025
Innovations in Search & Information Retrieval.
Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s (BCS IRSG) annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval (IR). We bring together practitioners, researchers, analysts and end users to discuss the latest developments in the IR community and to share insights between research and practice.
The event consists of a Tutorial day (25 November) and a Conference day (26 November), each of which has a separate registration.The conference day includes presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval.
Search Solutions conference 2025 - 26 November
Session 1: Evaluation
- Alessandro Benedetti (Sease) “Search Quality Evaluation in the Era of Large Language Models: RRE-Dataset Generator”
- Gianna Cipponeri “Evaluating Citation Quality and Context Faithfulness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Product-Specific Framework”
- Panel questions and answers
Session 2: Focus on the User
- Orland Hoeber (University of Regina) “Support Human Intelligence – An Alternative to Retrieval Augmented Generation in Academic Digital Library Search”
- Mark Harwood (Ex Elastic Developer) “Plasticine Not Porcelain: Shaping Embeddings Through Interactive Clustering”
- 5 Stephann Makri and Andrew MacFarlane (City St. George’s, University of London) ““The Internet is Hard. Is Words”: Investigating Information Difficulties Experienced by People with Aphasia and Strategies for Combatting them”
- Panel questions and answers
Session 3: Search Effectiveness
- Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) “Re-Thinking Re-Ranking”
- Cedric Ulmer (France Labs) “Adding GenAI to Datafari Community Edition - what and why”
- Panel questions and answers
Session 4: Professional Search
- Adam Roegiest (Zuva) “Information Retrieval Evaluation in the Real-World: A Legal Tech Perspective”
- Jon Brassey (Trip Database) “Harnessing AI for Faster, Smarter Clinical Decision Support: The Evolution of Trip Database”
- Marianne Lykke (Aalborg University) “Role of metadata and taxonomies in professional contexts”
- Panel questions and answers
- Panel session
- BCS Search Industry Awards
