2 December 2005 Advanced Topics in Big Data Introduction Prof. Beat Signer Department of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel beatsigner.com Department of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel beatsigner.com 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 2 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation ▪ Prof.Beat Signer Vrije Universiteit Brussel PL9.3.60 (Pleinlaan 9) +32 2 629 1239 [email protected] wise.vub.ac.be/beat-signer ▪ Prof.Bas Ketsman Vrije Universiteit Brussel F.10.741 +32 2 629 3480 [email protected] https://www.basketsman.com A picture containing person, person, necktie, wearing Description automatically generated 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 3 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Prof.Pieter Libin Vrije Universiteit Brussel PL9.3 (Pleinlaan 9) +32 2 629 2964 [email protected] ai.vub.ac.be/team/pieter-libin/ ▪ Further, there are various teaching assistants and PostDocs helping with the individual supervision 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 4 February 10, 2026 Prerequisites ▪ Students who want to enrol for this course, must have passed or be enrolled in Scalable Analytics and Information Visualisation 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 5 February 10, 2026 Course Goals ▪ In this seminar the student gets insights about recent developments in the field of Big Data systems. They will deepen their knowledge about specific topics in Big Data systems and are required to communicate the outcome to other course participants. The student should be able to critically review the assigned research papers, identify the main contributions and communicate the content in the form of a presentation as well as in a written report. ▪ The student is required to identify the contributions as well as strengths and weaknesses of a given research paper. They should further get an insight of how evaluate and position a research paper in the context of related work. 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 6 February 10, 2026 Course Goals ▪ As part of the seminar the student is required to clearly communicate about the assigned research topic. The attendee shows that they can reflect on a given research topic and discuss it with colleagues by asking and answering scientific questions. 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 7 February 10, 2026 Course Material ▪ All material will be available on Canvas ▪ lecture slides, papers, presentations, links, ... ▪ Make sure that you are subscribed to the Advanced Topics in Big Data course on Canvas ▪ https://canvas.vub.be/courses/44859 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 8 February 10, 2026 Data Management Big Data systems Main Domains of the Seminar scalable data management advanced query processing (e.g. approximate query processing) large-scale analytical database systems data integration and interoperability innovative data storage exploratory search complex data exploration and analysis multimodal information retrieval visual data discovery data mining interactive data processing data physicalisation mixed reality and TUIs cross-media information management and interaction information visualisation context-awareness and personalisation hypermedia and linked data DAMA Human-Data Interaction Data Processing and Discovery 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 9 February 10, 2026 Seminar Topics 1. Iterative Queries ▪ Trampoline-Style Queries for SQL, Louisa Lambrecht, Torsten Grust, Altan Birler and Thomas Neumann, Proceedings of CIDR 2025, 15th Annual Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 2025. [https://vldb.org/cidrdb/papers/2025/p1-lambrecht.pdf] 2. Query Patterns ▪ Relational Diagrams and the Pattern Expressiveness of Relational Languages, Wolfgang Gatterbauer and Cody Dunne, ACM SIGMOD Record 54(1), April 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3733620.3733637] 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 10 February 10, 2026 Seminar Topics … 3. Main-Memory Index Structures ▪ HOT: A Height Optimized Trie Index for Main-Memory Database Systems, Robert Binna, Eva Zangerle, Martin Pichl, Günther Specht and Viktor Leis, Proceedings of SIGMOD 2018, International Conference on Management of Data, Houston, USA, June 2018. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3183713.3196896] 4. Scholarly PIM ▪ Garden of Papers: Finding, Reading, and Organizing Research Papers in a Visual, Integrated, and Flexible Workspace, Donghyeok Ma, Hanbee Jang, Joon Hyub Lee and Seok-Hyung Bae, Proceedings of UIST 2025, 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Busan, Republic of Korea, September 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747637] 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 11 February 10, 2026 Seminar Topics … 5. Information Visualisation Interaction ▪ Libra: An Interaction Model for Data Visualization, Yue Zhao, Yunhai Wang, Xu Luo, Yanyan Wang and Jean-Daniel Fekete, Proceedings of CHI 2025, International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan, April 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713769] 6. Cross-Reality Collaboration ▪ Garden of Papers: Finding, Reading, and Organizing Research Papers in a Visual, Integrated, and Flexible Workspace, Donghyeok Ma, Hanbee Jang, Joon Hyub Lee and Seok-Hyung Bae, Proceedings of UIST 2025, 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Busan, Republic of Korea, September 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747708] 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 12 February 10, 2026 Seminar Topics … 7. Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning ▪ Divide and Conquer: Provably Unveiling the Pareto Front with Multi- Objective Reinforcement Learning, Willem Röpke, Mathieu Reymond, Patrick Mannion, Diederik M. Roijers, Ann Nowé and Roxana Rădulescu, Proceedings of AAMAS 2025, 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Detroit, USA, May 2025. [https://doi.org/10.5555/3709347.3743984] 8. Epidemic Modelling ▪ A Physics-informed Neural Network Approach for Compartmental Epidemiological Models, Caterina Millevoi, Damiano Pasetto and Massimiliano Ferronato, PLOS Computational Biology, September 2024. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012387] 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 13 February 10, 2026 Seminar Topics … 9. Foundation Models ▪ Olympiad-Level Formal Mathematical Reasoning With Reinforcement Learning, Thomas Hubert et al., Nature, November 2025. [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09833-y] 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 14 February 10, 2026 Assignment of Topics ▪ Select 6 topics/papers from the presented list and mark them (with A to F) according to your preferences ▪ Send an email with your choices (e.g. 3A, 7B, 9C, 4D, 1E, 5F) [email protected] no later than February 14 ▪ Each student will be assigned a paper that has to be presented in the seminar and the final seminar schedule will be made available by next week 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 15 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation ▪ Presentation should be 30 minutes long (not longer but also not shorter!) ▪ make use of the available time ▪ have some backup slides /material in case you finish too early and for the Q&A ▪ presentation that is more than 10 minutes too short results in an immediate failure ▪ Structure of your presentation ▪ introduction of topic and problem statement (5–10 mins) ▪ proposed approach (15–20 mins) ▪ review (5 mins) - critical analysis - at least two positive and two negative points about the paper 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 16 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Send a draft of your presentation to your supervisor no later than one week before the presentation and arrange a meeting with your supervisor ▪ you will get feedback about the structure and content of your presentation ▪ Immediately after your presentation, please send us ([email protected]) your slides in order that we can make them available for your colleagues on Canvas 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 17 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Each student has to write a report about their presented paper/topic ▪ same structure as presentation - introduction of topic and problem statement - proposed approach - review ▪ no longer than 5 pages ▪ send a draft to your supervisor to get some feedback - arrange a meeting with your supervisor ▪ deadline for final report: May 19 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 18 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Each student will be assigned as a reviewer for two additional papers ▪ hand in a review via the conference system ▪ deadline: at least a week before the paper is presented ▪ Each student is assigned as a metareviewer for one paper ▪ hand in a metareview via the conference system ▪ based on the two reviews and the metareviewer's knowledge ▪ deadline: latest Sunday (midnight) before the paper is presented ▪ prepare at least two questions to open the discussion round ▪ template and example (meta)reviews are available on Canvas 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 19 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Each student has to read the papers to be presented every week before the seminar takes place and submit two questions via an online form by latest Sunday (midnight) before the lecture ▪ https://wise.vub.ac.be/atobi/ 

Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - [email protected] 20 February 10, 2026 Seminar Organisation … ▪ Final grade is based on ▪ presentation (70%) ▪ written report ▪ reviews and metareview ▪ active participation in the seminar and submitted questions ▪ Everybody is expected to read the papers before the lecture takes place! ▪ after each presentation, there is enough time for questions and a discussion about the topic and content of the paper ▪ Attendance to all presentations is mandatory! ▪ Schedule will be made available on Canvas ▪ first presentations: March 31 

2 December 2005 Next Week Assign Topics and Answer Questions Some Tips for the Presentation Conference System