Lucene/Solr Revolution becomes ACTIVATE

ACTIVATE began as “Lucene/Solr Revolution” back in 2010, when we were at the forefront of a revolution. Open source search was beginning to take hold as a viable replacement for legacy black-box search vendors, and the Big Data era was in its infancy. Lucidworks started Lucene/Solr Revolution to bring the Lucene and Solr communities together to meet, network, and drive innovation to the open source projects.

Fast forward 8 years, and Apache Solr has been adopted to power many of the most critical applications at the world’s most innovative companies. Companies like Apple, Reddit, and Salesforce have taken the main stage at Revolution to show us how they are building tools with Solr to power their most important applications. In all of these cutting-edge use cases for Solr, there are consistent themes. Legacy search technologies have been replaced with open source Solr-based platforms, these platforms have to be able to scale well beyond all the platforms they have displaced and to enable many more use cases, and there is now an ever-increasing demand for smarter, AI-powered search capabilities to drive relevancy and insights.

Today, Lucene/Solr are the de-facto standard for running search across most organizations. The revolution we started back in 2010 has been a wild success –  the Revolution has been won!  With the overall focus on core Lucene having declined over the years as people have increasingly embraced Solr to build more sophisticated search solutions, and with the realization that the revolution has accomplished its mission, the name “Lucene/Solr Revolution” is ripe for this branding facelift to “Activate, the Search & AI conference”. While continuing to keep you up-to-date on the latest and greatest in Solr, we also want to drive innovation around the larger ecosystem surrounding Solr, including complementary technologies (Spark, Fusion, NLP, Machine Learning, UX, etc.) and to ensure that as a community we increasingly attract and embrace a much larger, diverse set of participants interested in tackling many of these emerging interdisciplinary problems in search and relevancy.

Although we’ve always had a diverse set of sessions at the conference, based upon feedback from last year and our expectation of an expanded audience in 2018, we will be more clearly segmenting sessions for attendees based upon areas of interest: talks dedicated specifically to deep dives into evolving capabilities in open source Solr, sessions for developers and operators harnessing the power of Solr along with complementary technologies, demonstrations of applied Artificial Intelligence and advanced relevancy techniques, and additional presentations covering new and evolving applications for search on the horizon.

In addition to talks from the brightest committers and contributors to the Apache Lucene/Solr project – including more than a dozen full-time committers working on the open source project at Lucidworks – you can expect to find more extensive content around techniques like NLP, Entity Extraction, Text Analytics, ML Algorithms, and Knowledge Graphs, as well as practical examples of the enhancement of search applications with AI.