Search Solutions 2025

Wednesday 26 November 2025, London

Innovations in Search and 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.

09:30 - 09:50 Registration and coffee 09:50 - 10:00 Introduction

We will then have a full day of talks and discussion. The detailed programme will be announced soon but here is the list of confirmed speakers so far:

* Alessandro Benedetti (Sease) “Search Quality Evaluation in the Era of Large Language Models: RRE-Dataset Generator” * Jon Brassey (TRIP) “Harnessing AI for Faster, Smarter Clinical Decision Support: The Evolution of Trip Database” * Gianna Cipponeri “Evaluating Citation Quality and Context Faithfulness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Product-Specific Framework” * Mark Harwood (Ex Elastic Developer) “Plasticine Not Porcelain: Shaping Embeddings Through Interactive Clustering” * Orland Hoeber (University of Regina) “Support Human Intelligence – An Alternative to Retrieval Augmented Generation in Academic Digital Library Search” * Marianne Lykke (Aalborg University) “Role of metadata and taxonomies in professional contexts” * Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) “Re-thinking re-ranking” * Adam Roegiest (Zuva) “Information Retrieval Evaluation in the Real-World: A Legal Tech Perspective” * Cedric Ulmer (France Labs) “Adding GenAI to Datafari Community Edition - what and why”

16:30 - 17:15 PANEL SESSION 17:15 - 17:25 BCS SEARCH INDUSTRY AWARDS 17:25 - 17:30 Closing words

17:30 EVENING RECEPTION

LOCATION

Search Solutions is organised by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS (The Chartered Institute for IT) and ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organization), and is held at the BCS Central London Office:

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT Ground Floor 25 Copthall Avenue London EC2R 7BP https://www.bcs.org/about-us/our-london-office-and-event-venue/

REGISTRATION

Registration fees (including VAT at 20%) for Search Solutions are as follows:

* BCS / ISKO member rate: £92 * Non-member rate: £110 * Students: £80

Registration fees include lunch. Tea and coffee will also be available throughout the day followed by a drinks reception in the evening.

Register here: https://IRSGSearchSolutions2025.eventbrite.co.uk

TUTORIAL DAY

Search Solutions also includes a Tutorial Programme on Tuesday, 25 November. A detailed programme will be announced in due course.

Tutorials are payable separately.

PAST EVENTS

Search Solutions has been held annually since 2007. For details of past events please see: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/informat...