I wrote the book Relevant Search, created the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank Plugin. I'll be teaching a small class targeted at Solr & Elasticsearch developers wanting to build smarter search applications. We go from TF*IDF to boosting techniques to semantic search & machine learning (learning to rank).
Here's why we created the class:
It's a great way to meet other folks working on relevance problems as well and brainstorm tough problems. A great way to get introduced to the larger relevance community.
Hope to see you there!