Advances in Database Research
News
- The kickoff meeting will take place on Thursday, in seminar room SR T06.
- The overarching topic of this seminar will be vector search.
Schedule
Location: Seminar room T06
About
Questions and discussions
For questions and discussions (also among students) regarding course specific topics please use the Slack channel #adr-se (Workspace dbteaching.slack.com).
Slack registration: Students register with their university email here: https://dbteaching.slack.com/signup
Procedure and Evaluation
The seminar consists of presentations given bei the students and discussions on the presentations.
Presentations: The students choose a current research paper (from a given list), which they prepare and present during the seminar. The presentation should be very detailed and didactically well prepared. Students should not just recite the explanations in the research paper, but acquire the necessary background knowledge and build their own understanding. Students should be able to respond to detailed questions and create and solve examples on their own.
Discussion: students listen to presentations by fellow students and young researchers and engage with the content in discussions.
The quality of the presentation, the participation in the discussions, and the quality of the contributions to the discussion will be evaluated.
Research Papers
The overarching topic of this seminar will be vector search.
Vector search enables databases to retrieve information based on meaning and similarity rather than exact matches. By transforming text, images, audio, or even code into numeric vectors, it allows queries like “how close in meaning is this item?” rather than simply “does this keyword appear?” This approach powers semantic search, recommendation systems, and many AI applications. The main challenges lie in scaling to large vector databases while maintaining high throughput and low latency, and in seamlessly combining vector search with exact predicate filtering.
The research papers will soon be announced on our Slack channel #adr-se. Please pick a paper by October 23, 2025.