SIGMOD/PODS 2024: the most relevant conference in database systems will take place in Chile
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Changed on 19/06/2024
For the first time in its more than 50-year history, the most influential event in the field of database systems will take place in Latin America, with Chile as the host country. The meeting is co-organized locally by the Universidad Católica de Chile and Inria Chile, with the goal of bringing together experts from the academia and the industry, all of them leaders in cutting-edge research on the theory and applications of large-scale digital data.
Santiago, Chile. May 2024.- In June 2024, the attention of the experts in data science at a global level will be focused in Chile. Over six days of intensive work, more than 800 scientists from universities, research centers, and the tech industry from Chile and abroad will gather at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024 Conference in Santiago to address—both theoretically and practically—the challenges of managing large volumes of data.
Pablo Barceló and Nayat Sánchez-Pi are the general chairs of ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024 and have managed to bring to Latin America and Chile for the first time the conference that will bring together hundreds of researchers.
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It is not by chance that Chile was chosen as the venue. For several decades, the Chilean scientific community has maintained a significant presence at this conference, with at least ten researchers regularly presenting their results at SIGMOD/PODS. Several of these works have received important awards at this event.
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Director of the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering at the Universidad Católica de Chile (IMC UC) Researcher at the IMFD and Cenia, and general chair of SIGMOD/PODS 2024
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It has involved a great effort to bring SIGMOD/PODS to Chile. The achievement of being the host of this conference is a recognition of the work of researchers who are considered leaders in their field in the region and the world. The reputation gained over the years has made it possible for our country to be the venue of this conference, a milestone that will further raise Chile's role in the data field.
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Director of Inria Chile and general chair of SIGMOD/PODS 2024
Barceló adds that "for example, in Chile, research has been carried out that currently allows for the extraction of information and understanding of behavior from social media in a matter of seconds."
Science made in Chile at ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024
Of the four keynotes at the conference, two are in charge of Chileans. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, full professor at the Universidad de Chile and senior researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), will address challenges and limitations in the area of data and machine learning. Meanwhile, Marcelo Arenas, full professor at the Universidad Católica de Chile and researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), will speak about his recent work on how to provide explanations for decisions made by artificial intelligence models.
Innovative applications and studies conducted by scientists from our country will be present at SIGMOD/PODS, with a particular focus on graph databases. These are models able to store interconnected information, allowing for faster and more accurate query results.
The advances aimed at improving graph databases query systems to provide not only precise information but also data richer in-depth and variety will be presented. The researchers involved are Diego Arroyuelo and Juan Reutter (Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD); Benjamín Bustos, Aidan Hogan, and Gonzalo Navarro (Universidad de Chile, IMFD); and Adrián Gómez-Brandón (Universidad de La Coruña, Spain, IMFD).
Another presentation will feature MillenniumDB, a new search engine model and system for graph databases that has already proven to be two to ten times faster than other systems currently in use (such as Amazon's or Neo4j's). This innovation involves 14 researchers and engineers, led by Domagoj Vrgoč and Carlos Rojas (Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD).
Aidan Hogan (Universidad de Chile, IMFD) and Domagoj Vrgoč (Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD) will lead a tutorial on how to query large-scale graph databases.
REmatch, a tool capable of extracting information from a pattern in text documents, will also be presented at SIGMOD/PODS. REmatch was developed by Cristian Riveros and Domagoj Vrgoč, along with Vicente Calisto, Gustavo Toro, and Nicolás Van Sint Jan, all from the Universidad Católica de Chile and IMFD, and Kyle Bossonney (University of Oxford).
Inria in the organization of ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024
In addition to the director of Inria Chile, Nayat Sánchez-Pi, who is the general chair of ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024 and co-leads the local organization of this event, other Inria researchers from both France and Chile will participate in the event.
Ioana Manolescu, a senior researcher at the Inria Saclay Centre, where she heads the CEDAR project-team, which focuses on cloud data analysis, is particularly prominent in the organization of the conference. She is also president of BDA, the French national scientific association dedicated to data management. At ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024 Ioana Manolescu co-leads the organization of the SIGMOD Demonstrations.
Luis Martí, scientific director of Inria Chile and researcher specialized in artificial intelligence, also participates. At ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2024, Luis Martí co-leads the organization of the conference sponsorships.
The impact of the web and social media
In the '90s, the birth of the World Wide Web opened the way to new research fields, such as the creation of systems for extracting and exchanging information from large-scale data, where millions of users converged. Created at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1989 as an information management system for researchers, it was developed throughout the 1990s, supported by a network of companies and research centers, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Inria was one of the creators of the initiative, becoming its European host in 1995, when it was chosen as a partner of MIT within the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) responsible for the standardization of web technologies. The W3C today brings together more than 450 members, academic and research institutions and economic agents, from small start-ups to large groups, and Bruno Sportisse, Chairman and CEO of Inria, is also president of the European node of the W3C.
"The 2000s is the decade when the term Big Data emerged. We were able to identify its challenges, such as the volume of information, production speed, and data diversity. This gave impulse to carry out research for new methods and systems for fields like astronomy or DNA sequencing," explains Pablo Barceló.
From 2010 to today, the advances made in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that use large data repositories have led part of the scientific community from SIGMOD/PODS to focus on the great challenge of AI bias.
"This urgent need has arisen to develop research on the responsible use of data and AI, studying the risks involved in manipulating large volumes of information to make decisions. Many of the works presented at SIGMOD/PODS address these challenges from a theoretical and applied perspective," concludes Nayat Sánchez.