Millennium DB wins award at SIGMOD/PODS 2024
August 2024. For the first time in its history, the most prestigious international conference on 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. These prototypes are sought to be visionary developments, based on solid applied research and aimed at solving fundamental problems in data management.
This segment of SIGMOD/PODS presents the Best Demo Award to the best prototype, and this year MillenniumDB, the new search engine for graph databases developed by IMFD, took second place. MillenniumDB has proven to be two to ten 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 participated in the development of MillenniumDB, which was led by Domagoj Vrgoč and Carlos Rojas (Catholic University of 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 at the Catholic University of Chile (IMC-UC) and researcher at 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 (University of Chile, IMFD) and Domagoj Vrgoč (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, IMFD) gave a tutorial session showing how to query large-scale graph databases.
Of the four keynote speeches at the event, two were given by Chileans. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, professor at the University of Chile and senior researcher at Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data IMFD), addressed the challenges and limitations of artificial intelligence from a data perspective, while Marcelo Arenas, professor at the Catholic University of Chile and associate researcher at the IMFD, discussed his recent research on models to explain the decisions made by artificial intelligence models.
In the frontier research section, an interdisciplinary study was presented that has made significant advances in improving graph database search systems, with the aim of providing not only accurate information, but also information that is richer in depth and nuance. The researchers are Diego Arroyuelo and Juan (Catholic University of Chile, IMFD); Benjamín Bustos, Aidan Hogan, and Gonzalo Navarro (University of Chile, IMFD); and Adrián Gómez-Brandón (University of A Coruña, Spain, IMFD). Another innovation presented was REmatch, a tool capable of extracting information from text documents based on a pattern. REmatch was developed by Cristian Riveros and Domagoj Vrgoč, together with Vicente Calisto, Gustavo Toro, and Nicolás Van Sint Jan, all from the Catholic University of Chile, and Kyle Bossonney (University of Oxford).
