CRAY Colloquium: Self-enhancing video data management in a multimodal database system
The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Magdalena Balazinska (University of Washington), will be giving a talk titled "Self-enhancing video data management in a multimodal database system"
Abstract
Advances in AI are making it increasingly practical to extend traditional database management systems with the ability to query unstructured data, including images and videos, thus producing multimodal database management systems. In this talk, we will discuss some of the key components required to build such systems, and will then focus specifically on video data management. A key challenge with video data management is the ability to support complex queries in diverse applications and over video data from a variety of domains. We will present the VOCAL system and how it uses vision language models (VLMs) to achieve self-enhancing video data management, where the system extends its functionality to cost-effectively support compositional queries expressed in natural language in a variety of domains, increasing its capabilities with usage.
Biography
Magdalena Balazinska is Professor, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair, and Director of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on database management systems with a current focus on video data management, multimodal data management, and generally connections between AI and data management. Prior to her leadership of the Allen School, Magdalena was the Director of the eScience Institute and the Associate Vice Provost for Data Science. Magdalena is an ACM Fellow. She holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). Shortly after her arrival at the University of Washington, she was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007). She also received the inaugural VLDB Women in Database Research Award (2016) for her work on scalable distributed data systems, and both a CIDR Test-of-Time Award (2025) and the ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award (2017) for her work on stream processing systems, a 10-year most influential paper award (2010) from her earlier work on reengineering software clones, and other best-paper and "best of" awards.
Category
Start date
Monday, April 27, 2026, 11:15 a.m.
End date
Monday, April 27, 2026, 12:15 p.m.
Location
Keller Hall 3-180