Ben Clavié is a machine learning researcher at Mixedbread, focused on NLP and information retrieval. Previously at Answer.AI, he has led projects that broaden access to state-of-the-art retrieval, including RAGatouille and the rerankers library, and co-led the ModernBERT project that modernized the widely used BERT backbone. Based in Tokyo and academically affiliated with the National Institute of Informatics, he also organizes the Late Interaction Workshop series and is exploring what LLMs open up for retrieval.

Hamel Husain is a ML Engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.