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 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.

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?