Thanks everyone for the warm welcome! I already know most of you but for all the others here's my brief bio :)
I am Italian (possibly the only other italian in addition to Tommaso) and I have been living in the UK for the last 7 years. I am currently based in London. I started working with Apache Solr back in 2010 (and a few months later with Apache Lucene), my first project was a search API that translated the Verity query language to Lucene syntax, at the time I was a junior software engineer with a background in Information Retrieval research at Roma3 university. Since then I have explored a lot of different use cases for Apache Lucene/Solr and I spent more and more time studying and working with the internals, across various companies and positions. My favourite projects in my career have been the design and implementation of a Semantic Search engine called Sensify (when I was working in a small and cohesive R&D team in Zaizi, with spanish friends and colleagues from Seville), the Apache Solr Learning To Rank plugin from Bloomberg (and integrations/applications) and the Rated Ranking Evaluator project (an Open Source library for Search Quality Evaluation we contributed back to the community). In 2016 I founded my own company, Sease where we try to build a bridge between Academia and the industry through Open Source software in the domain of Information Retrieval. As David mentioned my main areas of contribution in Apache Lucene/Solr have been the More Like This, the Learning To Rank plugin, Synonyms expansion and the Suggester component. I have a lot of ideas in my to do list, so stay tuned, we'll have a lot to discuss and innovate ! It is a pleasure to join this group and I am sure we'll do great things together :) Cheers -------------------------- Alessandro Benedetti Search Consultant, R&D Software Engineer, Director www.sease.io On Wed, 18 Mar 2020 at 13:00, David Smiley <david.w.smi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > Please join me in welcoming Alessandro Benedetti as the latest Lucene/Solr > committer! > > Alessandro has been contributing to Lucene and Solr in areas such as More > Like This, Synonym boosting, and Suggesters, and other areas for years. > Furthermore he's been a help to many users on the solr-user mailing list > and has helped others through his blog posts and presentations about > search. We look forward to his future contributions. > > Congratulations and welcome! It is a tradition to introduce yourself with > a brief bio, Alessandro. > > ~ David Smiley > Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer > http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley >
