Communications of the ACM regional special recognizes work of IMFD researchers
Three IMFD papers are highlighted in the recent edition of Communications of the ACM: Latin American Regional Special Section. The special, coordinated by Fabio Kon (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil), Sebastian Uchitel (University of Buenos Aires), and IMFD researcher and DCC UCH academic Barbara Poblete, seeks to present the most interesting and impactful advances in computer science in the region.
"Latin America is a very heterogeneous continent, with great cultural, geographic, demographic, ethnic, linguistic, scientific and technological diversity. When it comes to computer science, Latin American researchers have made significant contributions in multiple areas, such as software engineering, databases, networks and distributed systems, artificial intelligence, theory of computation, and computer science education. In this Regional Special Section, we present only a small part of the work that Latin American researchers are currently doing," the committee highlights in the video presentation of the special section.
Better understanding the constituent process
In Telar and TelarKG: Data-Driven Insights into Chile's Constitutional Process, the multidisciplinary team of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, presents the work done to analyze and better understand the first constituent process in Chile, which had the objective of weaving together diverse data from disparate sources related to the constitutional process, in order to obtain information and communicate the results to the Chilean public. "The analyses made were diverse, and included observation of the use of bots in social networks, the most discussed topics in social networks during the process, the categorization and cohesion of emerging ideologies within the constitutionals from their voting patterns, etc. To disseminate the results, we had a weekly program on CNN Chile dedicated to the Loom Project to present and discuss our results, and disseminate them directly to Chilean society," says Aidan Hogan, DCC U. Chile academic and IMFD researcher.
In "Telar and TelarKG: Data-Driven Insights into Chile's Constitutional Process " worked Renzo Angles (U. de Talca), Naim Bro (U. Adolfo Ibáñez), Ivania Donoso-Guzmán (Universidad Católica de Chile), Juan Pablo Luna (Universidad Católica de Chile), Aidan Hogan (Universidad de Chile), Juan Reutter (Universidad Católica de Chile), Henry Rosales-Méndez (Universidad de Chile) and Sergio Toro (Universidad Mayor).
Differential privacy
Another published article is "Gradual Differentially Private Programming"by IMFD researchers and University of Chile academics Matías Toro, Federico Olmedo and Éric Tanter, who explain that this research attacks the problem of how to develop software systems that use user data without violating their privacy, using a technique known as differential privacy. "Specifically, what we propose there is to make type systems designed to support programmers in respecting differential privacy more flexible, by using a gradual approach, i.e. one that mixes static verification with dynamic verification. This approach will make it possible to facilitate the progressive and selective adoption of privacy annotations in programs that exploit sensitive data of individuals, thus providing early feedback to developers to avoid violating data privacy accidentally," he says.
Efficient implementation of graph databases
Finally, Communications of the ACM includes in its edition on research in Latin America the article "Tackling Challenges in Implementing Large-Scale Graph Databases".by researchers Diego Arroyuelo (Universidad Católica de Chile), Aidan Hogan (Universidad de Chile), Gonzalo Navarro (Universidad de Chile), Juan Reutter (Universidad Católica) and Domagoj Vrgoč (Universidad Católica). This paper recounts research being conducted at IMFD regarding efficiently implementing graph databases. "These databases allow easy representation of objects and relationships between them, and are emerging very strongly as an alternative to traditional relational databases in cases where information is more heterogeneous and unstructured. All major Internet companies are developing their graph database engines. An example of a public graph database is Wikidata, which is used to deliver information on Wikipedia pages", explains Gonzalo Navarro.
The article reports the main results obtained and what they are working on. About this, Navarro points out: "One challenge of these databases is that solving queries on them is computationally expensive. For example, we are looking for a more efficient alternative to BlazeGraph, to replace it, and the IMFD is postulating one of our prototypes, MillenniumDB, to be the support that maintains Wikidata". The researcher further comments that they describe Ring, a development done at IMFD, which allows queries from a very significant subset of SPARQL to be resolved using far fewer storage resources. He also points out that this article "describes the challenges they are currently facing, which are related to providing access to multimodal information, i.e., not only about the relationships represented in the graph, but also about other information that the objects may contain, depending on the type of data they represent".
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