Scientific community shares experiences on ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024, global database event organized in Chile
Date :
Changed on 01/08/2024
For six days, Santiago brought together 684 scientists and database experts from around the world. We gathered testimonies from researchers and students who participated in the conference held for the first time in Chile and Latin America.
For the first time in its history, the most prestigious international conference on databases, ACM SIGMOD/PODS, was held in Latin America, with Chile as the host country. Led by Nayat Sánchez-Pi, director of Inria Chile, and Pablo Barceló, director of the Institute of Mathematical Engineering and Computational Science of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (IMC-UC) and researcher of the Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD) and the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (Cenia), both general chairs of the conference, the event brought together nearly 700 scientists, students, and experts from around the world to address the challenges of managing large volumes of data.
Santiago, global hub for data management for a week
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024 had significant participation from Latin American scientists and experts, more than half of them Chilean, demonstrating the growing interest in the region for research in topics related to data science.
The event featured keynote speeches by Chilean researchers such as the Research Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science at the Universidad de Chile and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Foundational Research on Data, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, and the Full Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and associate researcher at the Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), Marcelo Arenas.
The technical program of SIGMOD/PODS was packed with talks, workshops, demo sessions, posters, and industrial and scientific sessions in which researchers from around the world participated. Among them, the presence of Ioana Manolescu and Pierre Senellart, two renowned researchers from the French National Institute for Research in Digital Sciences and Technologies, Inria, stood out.
Security and Artificial Intelligence: key challenges in data management
At the conference, Ioana Manolescu highlighted the importance and diversity of the research presented, focusing particularly on advances in the fields of security and artificial intelligence. In this regard, the Inria researcher emphasized two key areas: first, Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a protocol that allows different entities to collaborate in the calculation of a joint result without revealing their individual data, an approach that is crucial in sectors such as finance or health, where privacy is paramount.
Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC or SMPC) is a cryptographic protocol that allows different parties to collaborate to provide information while preserving the identity of the parties. In this way, it allows the parties, who may not trust each other, to provide inputs with various data, without the participants knowing who and where the data comes from, providing more security than conventional cloud systems.
In second place, she highlighted the studies that incorporate generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT for functions such as database queries or evaluations of artistic objects, demonstrating how artificial intelligence can handle tasks that traditionally required human intervention.
Strengthening the Latin American and Chilean digital ecosystem
The conference highlighted the urgency of developing research in artificial intelligence and data management in a responsible manner, addressing the risks and biases inherent in the use of large volumes of information. Many of the works presented at SIGMOD/PODS focused on these challenges, both from a theoretical and applied perspective.
Regarding the topic, Maribel Acosta, academic from the Technische Universität München, Germany, highlighted the way in which the conference addressed data science, especially with topics related to the intersection of data in different areas of computing. "The intersection of work in AI and in the theoretical part of data management has made for us a very unique experience for those of us who are dedicated to computing," she explained.
In addition to data science, machine learning and AI, were other aspects valued by students present at the conference. This was stated by Lucas Carrasco, a student at the University of Chile. "Even when I initially thought that it only covered topics of databases, it includes many other aspects and makes it a highly enriching experience," said Lucas.
The active presence of students, researchers, and academics from all over Latin America in the activities carried out during SIGMOD PODS reflects the growing interest towards data science in Chile and the rest of the continent. From Inria Chile, it is hoped that this enthusiasm will continue to grow and strengthen the regional scientific community.
Verbatim
The beautiful thing about the conference is being able to meet other people and know what they are working on and for various other reasons. On the one hand, there are the meetings and encounters that one expects, especially with people who work on the same topics as oneself, but also the unexpected encounters, with results that one might consider useful and perhaps one didn't even know existed. This is why conferences are good opportunities to have these encounters with people from around the world.
Auteur
Poste
Senior Researcher, leader of the CEDAR project-team at Inria, and co-chair of SIGMOD demonstrations.
Verbatim
It has been super relevant to bring this conference to Chile. It is an event that is naturally linked to database management and it is important because now Chile, in particular, has a leading role in the region around these topics of data science, artificial intelligence, and others related. It is playing a very important role and I believe that has allowed the country to position itself as the host of a conference of this size.
Auteur
Poste
CEO Inria Chile, and general chair of SIGMOD/PODS 2024.
Heck out the following testimonies from participants in this edition of SIGMOD/PODS 2024:
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024: Testimony from Marcelo Arenas
Full Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Associate Researcher at the Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD).
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024: Testimony from Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Research Director at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Universidad de Chile and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Foundational Research on Data.
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024: Testimony from Lorena Etcheverry
Associate Professor, Institute of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de la República, Uruguay
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024: Testimony from Chandrasekaran Mohan
Distinguished Professor of Science at Hong Kong Baptist University, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and Member of the Governing Council of Digital University Kerala.
ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024: Testimony from latin american researchers
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Genoveva Vargas Solar, senior researcher, CNRS, member of the DataBase group of the Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d’information (LIRIS).
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Juan Sequeda, Principal Researcher and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at data.world.
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Maribel Acosta, Professor, Technische Universität München, Germany.