I spent part of last week at the 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval in Dublin, as I had been asked to speak during the Industry Day (of which, more later – far too much useful information to cram into one blog post!). Arriving late afternoon on Wednesday I caught up with Olly Betts of Oligarchy, one of the core Xapian developers who’d travelled from New Zealand. Olly told me more about the Xapian projects running as part of Google’s Summer of Code – very exciting to hear that there were over 40 applicants this year for a limited number of slots.
We went on to the conference banquet at the Lyons Estate outside the city – which in some ways reminded me of Portmeirion – and caught up with people from Google Zurich amongst others. This was one of several fantastic venues organised by the Dublin team led by Cathal Gurrin (at Industry Day itself we were high above the city with great view, and I heard good things about the Guinness Storehouse, the venue for the first day of the conference).
Thanks to all the team (especially Udo Kruschwitz and Tony Russell-Rose for organising Industry Day). I look forward to catching up with some of you at the next BCS IRSG Search Solutions event on November 16th.
