Wednesday 

Room 6 - Level 5 

15:00 - 16:00 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

Contextual search with vector search: exploring your options with open source tools

Have you noticed the recent improvement in how our searches have become smarter? It's fascinating how vector search technology has enhanced our contextual search experience. The underlying idea is quite straightforward.

Tools

For example, let's consider an example of a movie recommendation system. The idea is to represent each movie in our catalog as a vector, a numerical representation of a piece of text.

Once we're done with that and also converted the search phrase into a vector, we step into a whole new realm — a multidimensional space where these vectors replace the original text values. Through some mathematical techniques, we can determine which movie representations are closest to the vector representing our search query!

How do we create such vector representations? We need an AI model trained on vast amounts of data to recognize patterns and effectively convert text phrases into vectors.

All of this you'll learn in this session. We'll try out different data solutions - ClickHouse, OpenSearch and PGVector. We'll also explore different models available depending on your language preference and skills, or, in case you 'd rather not run the model locally, what APIs you can use to do data inference for free.

Plenty of demos and a bit of coding for each of the options. This session will be useful for anyone who is intrigued by contextual search and usage of AI, but might find themselves overwhelmed by the complexities to get started.

Olena Kutsenko

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.

A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.

As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.