MillenniumDB is awarded at SIGMOD/PODS 2024

August, 2024.- For the first time in its history, the most prestigious international conference in data science, ACM SIGMOD/PODS, was held in Latin America, with Chile as the host country. One of the sections of this important conference is the presentation of cutting-edge prototypes of new data management systems. What is sought in these prototypes is that they be visionary developments, based on solid applied research work, aiming to solve fundamental problems in data management. 
This segment of SIGMOD/PODS awards the Best Demo Award to the best prototype, and this year MillenniumDB, the new search engine for graph databases developed by the IMFD, took second place. MillenniumDB has proven to be two to 10 times faster than other systems currently in use (such as those from Amazon or Neo4j) and can be used with multiple data models and query languages. It has been successfully tested with Wikidata, one of the largest graph databases, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Fourteen academics, researchers, and engineers took part in the development of MillenniumDB, led by Domagoj Vrgoč and Carlos Rojas (P. Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD).

SIGMOD/PODS 2024 was led by Nayat Sánchez-Pí, director of Inria Chile, and Pablo Barceló, director of the Institute of Mathematical and Computational Engineering of the Universidad Católica de Chile (IMC-UC) and researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD) and the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (Cenia). The conference brought together nearly 700 scientists, students, and experts to address the challenges of managing large volumes of data.

Strong IMFD presence
The IMFD also had a strong presence at the event. Aidan Hogan (U. de Chile, IMFD) and Domagoj Vrgoč (P. Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD) gave a tutorial session in which they showed how to query large-scale graph databases.

Of the four keynote lectures at the event, two were given by Chileans. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Full Professor at Universidad de Chile and Senior Researcher at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), addressed the challenges and limitations of artificial intelligence from a data perspective, while Marcelo Arenas, Full Professor at P. Universidad Católica de Chile and Associate Researcher at the IMFD, discussed his recent research on models for explaining the decisions made by artificial intelligence models. 

In the frontier research section, an interdisciplinary work was presented that has achieved important advances in improving search systems on graph databases, with the aim of producing results that are not only accurate, but also richer in depth and nuance. The researchers are Diego Arroyuelo and Juan Reutter (P. Universidad Católica de Chile, IMFD); Benjamín Bustos, Aidan Hogan, and Gonzalo Navarro (Universidad de Chile, IMFD); and Adrián Gómez-Brandón (University of A Coruña, Spain, IMFD). Another innovation presented was REmatch, a tool capable of extracting information based on a pattern from text documents. REmatch was developed by Cristian Riveros and Domagoj Vrgoč, together with Vicente Calisto, Gustavo Toro, and Nicolás Van Sint Jan, all from P. Universidad Católica de Chile, and Kyle Bossonney (University of Oxford).