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Keynote Lectures

Keynote Lecture
Mona Diab, Carnegie Mellon University, United States

Scalable Vector Analytics: A Story of Twists and Turns
Themis Palpanas, University Paris Cite, France

Keynote Lecture

Mona Diab
Carnegie Mellon University
United States

Brief Bio
Mona Diab is the new Director of the LTI. She is also the director of the R3LIT lab at CMU. Prior to joining CMU, she was a Lead Responsible AI Research Scientist with Meta. She was also a full Professor of Computer Science at the George Washington University (on leave) where she directed the CARE4Lang NLP Lab. Before joining Meta, she led the Lex Conversational AI project within Amazon AWS AI. Her current focus is on Responsible AI and how to operationalize it for NLP technologies and AI in general. Her interests span building robust technologies for low resource scenarios with a special interest in Arabic technologies, (mis) information propagation, computational socio-pragmatics, computational psycholinguistics, NLG evaluation metrics, Language modeling and resource creation. Mona has served the community in several capacities: Elected President of SIGLEX and SIGSemitic, and she currently serves as the President for ACL SIGDAT, the board supporting EMNLP conferences. She has delivered tutorials and organized numerous workshops and panels around Arabic processing, Responsible NLP, Code Switching, etc. She is a cofounder of CADIM (Consortium on Arabic Dialect Modeling, previously known as Columbia University Arabic Dialects Modeling Group), in 2005, which served as a world renowned reference point on Arabic Language Technologies. Mona was just awarded the King Salman Global Arabic Academy Prize for Arabic Language Technologies for 2023. Moreover she helped establish two research trends in NLP, namely computational approaches to Code Switching and Semantic Textual Similarity. She is also a founding member of the *SEM conference, one of the top tier conferences in NLP. Mona has published more than 250 peer reviewed articles.

Abstract
Available soon.

Scalable Vector Analytics: A Story of Twists and Turns

Themis Palpanas
University Paris Cite
France

Brief Bio
Themis Palpanas is an elected Senior Member of the French University Institute (IUF), a distinction that recognizes excellence across all academic disciplines, and Distinguished Professor of computer science at the University Paris Cite (France), where he is director of the Data Intelligence Institute of Paris (diiP), and director of the data management group, diNo. He received the BS degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada. He has previously held positions at the University of California at Riverside, University of Trento, and at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and visited Microsoft Research, and the IBM Almaden Research Center. His interests include problems related to data science (big data analytics and machine learning applications). He is the author of 14 patents. He is the recipient of 3 Best Paper awards, and the IBM Shared University Research (SUR) Award. His service includes the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees (2018-2023), Editor-in-Chief for PVLDB Journal (2024-2025) and BDR Journal (2016- 2021), PC Chair for IEEE BigData 2023 and ICDE 2023 Industry and Applications Track, General Chair for VLDB 2013, Associate Editor for the TKDE Journal (2014-2020), and Research PC Vice Chair for ICDE 2020.

Abstract
Similarity search in high-dimensional data spaces was a relevant and challenging data management problem in the early 1970s, when the first solutions to this problem were proposed. Today, fifty years later, we can safely say that the exact same problem is more relevant (from Time Series Management Systems to Vector Databases) and challenging than ever. Very large amounts of high-dimensional data are now omnipresent (ranging from traditional multidimensional data to time series and deep embeddings), and the performance requirements (i.e., response-time and accuracy) of a variety of applications that need to process and analyze these data have become very stringent and demanding. In these past fifty years, high-dimensional similarity search has been studied in its many flavors. Similarity search algorithms for exact and approximate, one-off and progressive query answering. Approximate algorithms with and without (deterministic or probabilistic) quality guarantees. Solutions for on-disk and in-memory data, static and streaming data. Approaches based on multidimensional space-partitioning and metric trees, random projections and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), product quantization (PQ) and inverted files, k-nearest neighbor graphs and optimized linear scans. Surprisingly, the work on data-series (or time-series) similarity search has recently been shown to achieve the state-of-the-art performance for several variations of the problem, on both time-series and general high-dimensional vector data. In this talk, we will touch upon the different aspects of this interesting story, present some of the state-of-the-art solutions, and discuss open research directions.