Simon Hughes
ML Engineer AI Researcher at Vectara
Riverside, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarSimon Hughes is an ML engineer and AI researcher with 11 years of experience building search and recommender systems across retail and HR domains. He led the vector search initiative at The Home Depot to bring semantic search to a high-traffic e-commerce platform and now focuses on LLM-driven neural information retrieval and hybrid IR systems at Vectara. His strengths span NLP, learning-to-rank, approximate k-NN, and practical deployment of zero-shot and hybrid semantic-lexical retrieval. He holds a PhD-level background in AI/NLP and combines research rigor with production-minded engineering to automate QA evaluation and optimize neural ranking at scale. Based in Riverside, Illinois, he has a track record of translating advanced IR research into user-facing improvements in large, real-world systems.
11 years of coding experience
Github Skills (126)
transformers10
language-model10
python10
arabic-nlp10
entity-linking10
deep-learning10
fairness-ml10
cython10
word2vec10
solr10
data-preprocessing10
neural10
ai10
transformer10
corenlp10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
DiceTechJobs/RelevancyFeedback
Sep 2017 - Mar 2019
Dice.com's relevancy feedback solr plugin created by Simon Hughes (Dice). Contains request handlers for doing MLT style recommendations, conceptual search, semantic search and personalized search
Contributions:19 commits, 1 PR, 40 pushes in 1 year 6 months
personalizedsolrmlthandlersrelevancy
DiceTechJobs/ConceptualSearch
Oct 2015 - Apr 2019
Train a Word2Vec model or LSA model, and Implement Conceptual Search\Semantic Search in Solr\Lucene - Simon Hughes Dice.com, Dice Tech Jobs
Contributions:34 commits, 77 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 7 months
traintech-jobsword2vec-modelsolrsearch-engine
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