Lester Solbakken
Employers on the program
- 2026Hornet.dev1 talk
- 2019–2022Verizon3 talks
The year around now
Talks in the past 12 months and announced talks ahead, one row per conference, January to December. Hover a mark for the talk.
Appearances by year
- Berlin Buzzwords
- Haystack
Talks
| Date | Event | Conference | Role | Title | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 7, 2026 | Berlin Buzzwords 2026 | Berlin Buzzwords | talk | When better retrieval makes agents worse as HORNET.dev Agentic systems can break not because information is missing, but because persuasively wrong context gets promoted into action. | Video |
| Jun 12, 2022 | Berlin Buzzwords 2022 | Berlin Buzzwords | talk | Hybrid search > sum of its parts? as Verizon Media (Vespa) Over the decades, information retrieval has been dominated by classical methods such as BM25. | Video |
| Oct 28, 2019 | Haystack Europe 2019 | Haystack | speaker | Ranking article comments using reinforcement learning as Verizon Media When allowing users to make comments on your content pages you face the problem that not all of them are worth showing - a difficult problem to solve. In this…Show lessWhen allowing users to make comments on your content pages you face the problem that not all of them are worth showing - a difficult problem to solve. In this talk we’ll show how this problem was attacked using reinforcement learning at serving time on Yahoo content sites, using the Vespa open source platform to create a scalable production solution. | SlidesVideo |
| Jun 16, 2019 | Berlin Buzzwords 2019 | Berlin Buzzwords | talk | Scaling ONNX and TensorFlow model evaluation in search as Verizon Media With the advances in deep learning and the corresponding increase in machine learning frameworks in recent years, a new class of software has emerged: model…Show lessWith the advances in deep learning and the corresponding increase in machine learning frameworks in recent years, a new class of software has emerged: model servers. | SlidesVideo |
Frequent co-speakers
| Speaker | Shared events | Shared talks | Last together |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nick Burch | 3 | — | 2026 |
| Radu Pop | 3 | — | 2026 |
| Uwe Schindler | 3 | — | 2026 |
| William Benton | 3 | — | 2026 |
| Lucian Precup | 3 | — | 2022 |
| Alessandro Benedetti | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Atita Arora | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Dmitry Kan | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Ilaria Petreti | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Jo Kristian Bergum | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Julien Nioche | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Olena Kutsenko | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Philipp Krenn | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Radu Gheorghe | 2 | — | 2026 |
| Amrit Sarkar | 2 | — | 2022 |
Speakers with the same name are merged into one entry, so this page may combine more than one person. Affiliations are shown as each conference listed them.