Tell HN: Simon Hughes Has Died

26 points

3 years ago

By most accounts, Simon isn't well known outside of the search community, but he was a brilliant community member and scientist who has done some incredible work.

Years before most people knew what an embedding was, Simon was working on making vector search mainstream. As early as 2016, he was showing how to integrate vector search into Solr (https://www.slideshare.net/lucidworks/implementing-conceptual-search-in-solr-using-lsa-and-word2vec-presented-by-simon-hughes-dicecom), and his 2019 "Search with Vectors" presentation at Haystack was a big contributor to getting the ball rolling in the search relevance community (https://haystackconf.com/2019/vectors/).

Most recently he was working with Vectara, and contributed to Vector Search, LLMs, and benchmarking hallucinations (https://vectara.com/cut-the-bull-detecting-hallucinations-in-large-language-models/). Vectara has announced they renamed HEM to be the Hughes Hallucination Eval Model in his honor.

Rest in Peace Simon.

https://www.ivinsfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Simon-Mark-Hughes?obId=30000023

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