Eric Pugh is the co-founder of OpenSource Connections. Today he helps OSC’s clients, especially those in the ecommerce space, build their own search teams and improve their search maturity, both by leading projects and by acting as a trusted advisor.Fascinated by the craft of software development, Eric Pugh has been involved in the open source world as a tester, developer, committer and user for the past twenty years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and co-authored the book Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, now on its third edition. He stewards Quepid, an open source platform for assessing and improving your search relevance.OpenSource Connections mission to empower the world’s search teams comes directly from Eric’s belief in the open source software movement, and the importance of educating people to succeed with it, so that people own their technology.When not thinking about search, Eric likes to get his hands dirty by building furniture. His next project is a reproduction Danish modern couch, using just hand 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 overwhelming landscape first hand. Yet Doug still works to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

Mingshi Liu is a Machine Learning Engineer at OpenSearch, contributing to OpenSearch, ML Commons, and Search Processors. Her work focuses on developing and integrating machine learning and agentic capabilities into search technologies. Mingshi began her OpenSearch journey as a core contributor, building personalization search and ML inference processors that run inferences during both ingest and search. She is one of the engineers behind OpenSearch's agentic search capabilities, and is currently leading the development of the OpenSearch Agent Server — an open-source remote agent server that brings agentic workflows to OpenSearch beyond the cluster. Passionate about new challenges, Mingshi thrives on solving search problems and pushing the boundaries of what search can do.