DSG Seminar Series • AI-Native Database

Speaker: Guoliang Li, Tsinghua University

Abstract:   

In big data era, database systems face three challenges. Firstly, the traditional heuristics-based optimization techniques (e.g., cost estimation, join order selection, knob tuning) cannot meet the high-performance requirement for large-scale data, various applications and diversified data. We can design learning-based techniques to make database more intelligent. Secondly, many database applications require to use AI algorithms, e.g., image search in database. We can embed AI algorithms into database, utilize database techniques to accelerate AI algorithms, and provide AI capability inside databases. Thirdly, traditional databases focus on using general hardware (e.g., CPU), but cannot fully utilize new hardware (e.g., ARM, AI chips). Moreover, besides relational model, we can utilize tensor model to accelerate AI operations. Thus, we need to design new techniques to make full use of new hardware. 

To address these challenges, we design an AI-native database. On one hand, we integrate AI techniques into databases to provide self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-protecting and self-inspecting capabilities for databases. On the other hand, we can enable databases to provide AI capabilities using declarative languages, in order to lower the barrier of using AI.  

In this talk, I will introduce the five levels of AI-native databases and provide the open challenges of designing an AI-native database. I will also take automatic database knob tuning, deep reinforcement learning based optimizer, machine-learning based cardinality estimation, automatic index/view advisor as examples to showcase the superiority of AI-native databases.

Bio:  Guoliang Li is a tenured full Professor of Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His research interests include AI-native database, big data analytics and mining, crowdsourced data management, big spatio-temporal data analytics, large-scale data cleaning and integration. He has published more than 100 papers in premier conferences and journals, such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, SIGKDD, SIGIR, TODS, VLDB Journal, and TKDE. He is a PC co-chair of DASFAA 2019, WAIM 2014, WebDB 2014, and NDBC 2016. He servers as associate editor for IEEE Transactions and Data Engineering, VLDB Journal, ACM Transaction on Data Science, IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin. He has regularly served as the (senior) PC members of many premier conferences, such as SIGMOD, VLDB, KDD, ICDE, WWW, IJCAI, and AAAI. His papers have been cited more than 6000 times. He got several best paper awards in top conferences, such as CIKM 2017 best paper award, ICDE 2018 best paper candidate, KDD 2018 best paper candidate, DASFAA 2014 best paper runner-up, APWeb 2014 best paper award, etc. He received VLDB Early Research Contribution Award 2017, IEEE TCDE Early Career Award 2014, The National Youth Talent Support Program 2017, ChangJiang Young Scholar 2016, NSFC Excellent Young Scholars Award 2014, CCF Young Scientist 2014.

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