In this talk, we will discuss the challenges of supporting traditional database operations (ingestion, schema design, querying) to the domain of visual data, i.e. images, videos, PDFs, etc. Recent innovations in artificial intelligence have enabled computers to “see” the same structure in visual data as humans. As a result, new systems are emerging which enable users and applications to manage and query this information, as databases have successfully done for more traditional structured data.

 

We will start by motivating the problem with recent industry trends and customer use cases, and then discuss some of the resulting technical challenges and how they differ from the problems traditional databases were designed to solve. Finally, we will discuss initial solutions for each of the major challenges, and why we believe this will be an exciting area for research and industry development over the next few decades.