Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data & AI consultant with extensive experience in the tech industry. He has advised and taught teams building AI-powered systems, including engineers from Netflix, Meta, & Amazon. He is the host of the industry Vanishing Gradients, where he explores cutting-edge developments in data science and artificial intelligence, & has written for publications such as Harvard Business Review & VentureBeat. Previously, Hugo served as Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds & held roles at Coiled & DataCamp, where his work in data science education reached over 6 million learners. He has taught at Yale University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and conferences like SciPy and PyCon, & is a passionate advocate for democratizing AI skills and open-source tools.

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?