Metadata Filtering: Smarter Vector Queries

Hosted by Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

Sat, Jul 18, 2026

10:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp & Certificate
Aki Wijesundara, PhD and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

Tag your chunks with useful metadata

Attach fields like date, source, and category so each piece of content can be filtered later.

Filter before you rank by meaning

Narrow the search to the right subset first, then let similarity decide the order within it.

Cut out close-but-wrong results

Stop retrieving content that is semantically near but belongs to the wrong time, place, or status.

Why this topic matters

Pure similarity search can hand back a result that is close in meaning but wrong in context: last year's policy, the wrong region, a draft instead of the final. In this free 30 minute session you add metadata filters to vector search so the query only considers chunks that match the right date, source, or category before ranking by meaning. You watch a query go from noisy to precise just by constraining the candidate set. You leave able to combine filters with semantic search so your answers come from the right slice of your data.

You'll learn from

Aki Wijesundara

AI Advisor | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

Manu Jayawardana

AI Founder | Co-Founder & CEO at Krybe | Co-Founder of Snapdrum

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes.

He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.

Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.

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