Events and Conferences
Industry and academic events where search, information retrieval, NLP, and AI are discussed and published. A practical guide to where the community gathers and what has come out of it.
Full conference calendar: The Search Juggler
Practitioner Events
Haystack (Haystack US · Haystack EU)
The search relevance conference run by OpenSource Connections, in two editions — Haystack US (Charlottesville, VA) and Haystack EU (Europe). Practitioner-focused (Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch). Doug Turnbull and the OpenSource Connections community are closely associated with it.
Notable vault connections:
- What Is a Judgment List? references a Haystack talk on human rater complexity
Berlin Buzzwords
Open-source data and search conference (Berlin). Strong search engineering track.
Notable vault connections:
- Hybrid search > sum of its parts? Berlin Buzzwords 2022 — Lester Solbakken presenting hybrid search: BM25 vs Dense Embeddings vs learned sparse, fusion strategies. Covers Hybrid Search, Reciprocal Rank Fusion, Embedding Fine-tuning
Activate
Lucidworks-organized conference for search applications and practitioners.
🔗 https://www.activate-conf.com/
Elastic{ON}
Elasticsearch ecosystem conference. Product announcements and engineering talks.
🔗 https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/
MICES (Mix-Camp E-Commerce Search)
Dedicated e-commerce search conference, organized by Rene Kriegler. Close overlap with E-commerce Search.
AI Engineer
Conference series for AI engineering practitioners. Covers LLMs, agents, context engineering, retrieval, and production AI systems.
AI Engineer Europe 2026 — London, April 8–10, 2026 🔗 https://www.ai.engineer/europe/2026
Notable vault connections:
- Agentic Search for Context Engineering — Leonie Monigatti (Elastic) workshop on agentic search tool patterns for Context Engineering; demonstrated semantic search, ES|QL query tool, and shell tool patterns
Academic Conferences
SIGIR
ACM flagship Information Retrieval conference.
Notable vault connections:
- ColBERT published at SIGIR 2020 by Omar Khattab and Matei Zaharia
- ColBERTv2 published at SIGIR 2021 — see What is ColBERT and Late Interaction and Why They Matter in Search?
SIGIR eCommerce Workshop
E-commerce-specific IR workshop co-located with SIGIR.
🔗 https://sigir-ecom.github.io/index.html
Close overlap with E-commerce Search and Query Understanding in Practice.
ECIR
European Conference on Information Retrieval.
TREC
NIST-run evaluation benchmarks and tracks. Directly relevant to Search Evaluation and Judgment Lists.
WSDM
Web Search and Data Mining. Industry + academic mix; web-scale retrieval, recommendation, ranking.
CIKM
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.
ACL / EMNLP / NAACL
NLP conferences. Source of foundational work on language models and embeddings. BERT — the basis for ColBERT, Bi-Encoder, and Cross-Encoder — originates from this community.
NeurIPS / ICML / ICLR
Core ML conferences. Source of embedding architectures, Learning to Rank advances, and LLM research feeding into Agentic Search and RAG.
Conference Output in This Vault
| Article | Conference | Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Hybrid search > sum of its parts? Berlin Buzzwords 2022 | Berlin Buzzwords 2022 | Hybrid Search, BM25, Dense Embeddings, Reciprocal Rank Fusion |
| What is ColBERT and Late Interaction and Why They Matter in Search? | SIGIR 2020 / 2021 | ColBERT, Late Interaction, Bi-Encoder |
| What Is a Judgment List? | References Haystack talk | Judgment Lists, Search Evaluation |
| Agentic Search for Context Engineering | AI Engineer Europe 2026 | Context Engineering, Agentic Search, RAG |
Related
- E-commerce Search — MICES, SIGIR eCommerce
- Search Quality Assurance — TREC, Haystack evaluation talks
- Conversational and Agentic Search — emerging topic at SIGIR and NeurIPS
- Books — companion reading list
- How to Start a Career in Search — where conferences fit in a learning path