Approximate Nearest Neighbor Queries and Vector Databases

• Prof. Mario Nascimento Khory College's Director of Pacific Northwest Research, Northeastern University
• Email: m.nascimento@northeastern.edu

The database community has been able to deal, in one way or another, with spatial and high-dimensional data for a long time. However, with the increasing use of AI/machine learning, particularly large language models and so-called embeddings, very high-dimensional vectors need to be managed as first-class citizens, leading to what is known as vector databases. In this tutorial, after laying the necessary background, we focus on an important class of queries within vector databases, namely approximate nearest neighbor queries, presenting and contrasting various approaches to process them. We will also list current challenges worthy of further research and, time permitting, discuss existing commercial vector database management systems.

Bio: Prof. Nascimento is currently with Northwest Research, based at the Vancouver Campus in Canada. Before that, he was a Professor at the University of Alberta’s Department of Computing Science (including a six-year tenure as Department Chair), a researcher with the Brazilian Agency for Agricultural Research and an adjunct faculty member with the Institute of Computing of the University of Campinas in Brazil. He was a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing, Aalborg University’s Department of Computer Science in Denmark, LMU’s Institute for Informatics in Germany, and Federal University of Ceara in Brazil.

His main research interests are in spatiotemporal data management and, according to Google Scholar, his publications have been cited 4,900+ times, yielding an H-index of 34 (DBLP kindly maintains (most of) my publications organized by year).

He served as the General co-Chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2024 as well as its Program Committee’s co-Chair in 2022 and 2023, and often served as a program committee member for the main database conferences, as well as (co-)chair of several workshops and symposia, most recently SSTD 2023. He has also served as ACM SIGMOD‘s Information Director (2002-2005), ACM SIGMOD Record‘s Editor-In-Chief (2005-2007) and VLDB Journal‘s Editorial Board member (2011-2017), and he is currently a member of  GeoInformatica’s Editorial Board and SSTD Endowment’s Board of Directors (Chair).