A Nod to Open Source and an Invitation to ACTIVATE 2019

At our annual ACTIVATE conference – this September in DC – attendees have the opportunity to participate in hands-on ApacheSolr and Lucidworks Fusion training and become a part of the growing open source community. As a corporate contributor to Apache Lucene/Solr, Lucidworks and open source are inextricably linked. Activate was previously called Lucene/Solr Revolution, growing from Lucidworks’ close relationship with the Apache Software Foundation and the open source community at large. This year we’re bringing the community together once again in Washington, DC, September 9-12. 

Empowering the Adopters, Committed to Committers

Employees of Lucidworks have contributed substantially to features like cross data center replication and SolrCloud over the years. Open source contributions to the surrounding Lucene/Solr ecosystem, though outside the project itself, help organizations to enhance search application performance and achieve the scale required in our new cloud-enabled era of computing.

We also offer training in the form of code, presentations, and blog posts for the community. We’ll be sharing much of this knowledge at this year’s Activate, check out the conference topics and trainings here. 

Working with Open Source at Lucidworks

Many of our teams rely on open source technologies that go beyond search and discovery with Solr. For example, we leverage Apache Spark to power machine learning pipelines and other tasks that benefit from parallelized processing. These same machine learning pipelines are built with models trained with the usual suspects in a data scientist’s toolbox, like Keras, TensorFlow, and Jupyter Notebooks. In addition to putting open source to work on the backend, we also use open source frameworks for the front-end UI layer complimenting the recent explosion in business intelligence applications.

The Next Big Challenge: Visualization

Our team is currently exploring several open source visualization technologies to help search teams around the world to make more sense of the data they have in their organization. Visualization improvements will empower managers of search applications to evangelize their efforts to cross-functional audiences for an increased commitment to search throughout the organization.

While many companies already rely on search as the core functionality of application architecture, AI-powered search will supplant non-search navigation elements as the primary discovery feature. Teams that aren’t search-focused will only embrace that trend if they can visualize key search KPIs and other, more specific data points in dashboards or other delivery formats that can be understood outside a search-specific context.

Imagining the Future of Search, Today

In the same way that text searches from the browser bar have surpassed trying to recall a retailer’s URL as you visit the first time, we’ll see more and more search app users interfacing directly with a search engine via keyboards and microphones. As applications have grown in complexity, the interfaces have grown more confusing. Even the most user-friendly interfaces will play second fiddle to the undisputed first chair, AI-powered search. Robust, scalable and widely available open source visualization technologies will help us all to understand exactly what that phrase means in production. This is an exciting time for the marriage between Lucidworks and open source.

Be sure to register for ACTIVATE 2019 (super early bird ticket discounts run until May 17th) and don’t forget to submit your speaking proposal before the May 8th deadline (full details). 

See you at ACTIVATE!