Retail & E-commerce

MICES 2026

MICES (Mix-Camp E-Commerce Search) 2026 is a one-day event in Berlin dedicated to e-commerce search. The event brings together experts from various disciplines - IT, product management, UX, search managers, information retrieval specialists, data scientists, and vendors - to discuss current challenges, best practices, and case studies in e-commerce search. T…

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12Speakers
3Sponsors
11On the bill · sessions
13Companies · in total
§I

Speakers

Programmed at MICES, in alphabetical order.
Andrea Polonioli
Coveo
Arne Vogt
Lead Product Manager for Search & Discovery · OTTO
Charlie Hull
The Search Juggler
Denise Schäfer
dm-drogerie markt
Doug Turnbull
softwaredoug.com
Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya
Senior Developer Advocate · Qdrant
Gennady Shabanov
Machine Learning Engineer · idealo
Ivan Potapov
Research Engineer, Search & Browse team · Zalando
Maëlly Dubois
Product & Operations Manager · Adelean
Mike Dirnberger
Backend Software Engineer and Search Consultant · diva-e
René Kriegler
Chief Strategy Officer at OpenSource Connections · OpenSource Connections
Sebastian Russ
Team Lead Search at Tudock · Tudock
§II

Sponsors

The houses behind the program. Tiers as disclosed.
Empathy.ai
OpenSource Connections
Tudock
§III

Agenda

Selected from 11 sessions on the bill.
  • 09:00-09:25

    Opening and welcome

    Opening and welcome by the MICES organizers René Kriegler and Sebastian Russ.

  • 09:25-09:55

    Precision vs. Recall: When Good Enough Beats Perfect

    Precision is a fundamental pillar of information retrieval. Yet we struggled to prove its value. Over the past years, we transformed our search from purely lexical to fully hybrid,…

  • 10:10-10:40

    Search, Chat, Ockham: When Two Interfaces Are One Too Many

    Over the past twelve months, ecommerce chatbots have gone mainstream - from Macy's to Argos, from Vans to Belk and now Frasers - positioned as the natural, expressive alternative t…

  • 10:45-11:15

    The Journey to Semantic Search in Omnichannel Retail at dm-drogerie markt

    Semantic search is transforming product discovery in e-commerce by moving beyond keywords toward a deeper understanding of user intent. We share how dm-drogerie markt has been buil…

  • 11:35-12:05

    Inside Zalando Search: Architecture Behind Product Discovery at Scale

    A look inside the Search & Browse architecture powering product discovery for millions of customers across Zalando's European markets. We'll walk through the system end-to-end: Ela…

  • 12:10-12:40

    Fine-Tuning Sparse Neural Retrievers for E-Commerce Is Not That Scary (And Often Worth It)

    Sparse neural retrieval is the middle ground between BM25+LTR, which you've already squeezed, and dense retrieval you'd rather not put in front of users. Inverted index, exact term…

  • 13:35-14:05

    How much searchandizing is too much searchandizing?

    You've installed a new search engine with powerful matching and ranking features - and now your executives, commercial team and users are complaining that certain products don't ap…

  • 14:10-14:40

    Autoresearch: coding agents to optimize e-commerce retrieval

    Machine Learning can be a challenging path. Deploying ML rerankers requires unique deployment infrastructure and specific skills. A new option has appeared with the rise of coding …

  • 14:55-15:25

    Hybrid search at idealo: from fine-tuning to production

    We share our journey of bringing hybrid search to idealo - combining vector and keyword retrieval in production. We cover how we fine-tuned our embedding model, the challenges we f…

Intermission
Part the Second · For the Buyer

What does it mean when 13 companies show up, and 2 bet on three roles at once?

Thirteen companies. two are betting more than once.

The numbers below are derived from the speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors on this page, cross-referenced into one ledger. They are the only thing here that 10times.com cannot tell you.

Who's in the room
2All threespeak · spons · exh
1Sponsoringsponsor only
10Companies Speakingspeaker only

The Triple-Threat

OpenSource Connections·Tudock

Speakers by seniority

8% of the speakers carry senior titles: C-suite, Founder, VP, or Director-level.

  • C-suite18%
  • Manager / Lead217%
  • Product18%
  • Engineer · IC325%
  • Research / Science18%
  • Other roles433%

Of 12 on the bill · classified by free-text title

Most-represented companies
  1. 01OpenSource ConnectionsSp1V
  2. 02TudockSp1V
  3. 03Empathy.aiSp
  4. 04Adelean1V
  5. 05Coveo1V
  6. 06Diva-e1V
  7. 07dm-drogerie markt1V
  8. 08idealo1V
  9. 09OTTO1V
  10. 10Qdrant1V
  11. 11softwaredoug.com1V
  12. 12The Search Juggler1V
  13. 13Zalando1V
Sponsors by tier
unspecified3
100% of 3