René has worked in search for almost two decades, including in projects for some of the top 10 German e-commerce sites. He is co-founder and co-organiser of MICES (Mix-Camp E-commerce Search), an event that brings together the e-commerce search community each year. His technological focus is on open-source search technologies. He created and maintains the Querqy open source library for query rewriting. He believes that good search is not just a result of good technology but also of a team’s understanding of their search users, their experimentation capabilities and providing their users with a good search UX.

René works as Chief Strategy Officer at OpenSource Connections, where he and his team empower the company’s clients on search and AI.

Trey is author of the book AI-Powered Search and is the founder of Searchkernel, a software company building the next generation of AI-powered search. He is an advisor to several startups and adjunct professor of computer science at Furman University. He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as chief algorithms officer and SVP of engineering at Lucidworks, an search company whose search technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations.

Trey is an instructor of Maven's AI-Powered Search course.