Keynotes
Meet GEC’24 Invited Speakers!
Bio
Georgia Koutrika is a Research Director at Athena Research Center in Greece. Before that, she worked at HP Labs, and IBM Almaden. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and she earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in Greece. Her research emerges at the intersection of data management and deep learning, focusing on conversational data exploration, fairness, and learnt data management. Her work has been incorporated in commercial products, described in 19 granted patents and 26 patent applications in the US and worldwide, and published in top-tier conferences and journals. She is a member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees, coordinating EiC for VLDB Journal, and chair of the ACM Europe Working Group on Seasonal Schools. She is EDBT2025 Demo Chair, and she was PC co-chair for VLDB 2023, co-EiC of Proceedings of the VLDB (PVLDB) Vol 16, general chair for ACM SIGMOD 2016, and member of the PVLDB Advisory board. She has received the EDBT 2023 Test-of-Time award, 2 best demo awards, and several industrial recognitions.
Natural Language Data Interfaces: A Data Access Odyssey
Abstract: Back in 1970’s, E. F. Codd worked on a prototype of a natural language question and answer application that would sit on top of a relational database system. Soon, natural language interfaces for databases (NLIDBs) became the holy grail for the database community. Different approaches have been proposed from the database, machine learning and NLP communities. Interest in the topic has had its peaks and valleys. After a long and adventurous journey of almost 50 years, there is a rekindled interest in NLIDBs in recent years, fueled by the need for democratizing data access and by the recent advances in deep learning and natural language processing, in particular. Neural NLIDBs are popping up like mushrooms. Are we close to finding the holy grail of data access? In this talk, we will go over the landscape of NLIDBs covering important research milestones to the latest neural-based developments in the field. We will present the lurking challenges that we need to surpass and the exciting research opportunities that the database community is called on solving.
Bio
Margarita Chli is a Professor of Robotic Vision and the director of the Vision for Robotics Lab, at the University of Cyprus and ETH Zurich. Her work has contributed to the first vision-based autonomous flight of a small drone and the first demonstration of collaborative monocular SLAM for a small swarm of drones. Margarita has given invited keynotes at the World Economic Forum in Davos, TEDx, and ICRA, and she was featured in Robohub’s 2016 list of “25 women in Robotics you need to know about”. Recently, she won the ERC Consolidator Grant, one of the most prestigious grants in Europe for blue-sky research, to grow her team at the University of Cyprus to research advanced robotic perception.
Vision-based robotic perception: are we there yet?
Abstract: As vision plays a key role in how we interpret a situation, developing vision-based perception for robots promises to be a big step towards robotic navigation and intelligence, with a tremendous impact on automating robot navigation. This talk will discuss our recent progress in this area at the Vision for Robotics Lab of ETH Zurich and the University of Cyprus (http://www.v4rl.com), and some of the biggest challenges we are faced with.