Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304.
Karima Echihabi, Assistant Professor
School of Computer Science
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco
High-dimensional vector similarity search has been recognized for half a century as a fundamental and challenging problem in computer science. It has recently gained increased prominence, both in academia and industry, due to the proliferation of deep network embeddings, which are typically dense vectors representing complex objects (e.g., images, text, tables), and the growing number of AI tasks that require dense vector search as a key subroutine (e.g., cleaning, discovery, retrieval). Nowadays, graph-based approximate vector search, despite lacking theoretical guarantees, is considered the method of choice for many applications thanks to its excellent empirical performance.
In this talk, we will give a brief overview of the vector similarity search problem, highlight some promising research directions covering both the exact and approximate flavors of the problem, and dive into the key findings of a recent extensive experimental evaluation of graph-based approximate vector search methods.
Bio: Karima Echihabi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco (UM6P). Her research interests lie in responsible and scalable data science. This spans topics in data management, machine learning, high- performance computing, and socio-legal studies.
She is the founding faculty advisor for the UM6P ACM Student Chapter, a senior member of the IEEE, and an Associate Editor for the ACM SIGMOD and PVLDB. Her research work has led to publications in top venues such as the ACM SIGMOD, Communications of the ACM, ICDE, and PVLDB. Before joining UM6P, she worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, Redmond, and the IBM Toronto Lab, and as an entrepreneur running her own consultancy business.
She is passionate about computer science education and has coached students in various competitions, leading to several awards including a Gold Medal at the 2024 UNESCO/IRCAI AI in Africa Competition, and a Silver Medal at the 2023 Moroccan National Programming Competition. She earned a BSc in Software Engineering from Al Akhawayn University, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Computer Science from Mohammed V University and Université de Paris.