UTS AAII Research Seminar

WHEN

25 November 2026
Wednesday
2.00pm - 3.00pm Australia/Sydney

WHERE

City campus
Room 408, Level 06, UTS Building 11 (CB11.06.408)

COST

Free admission

CONTACT

Email: Professor Lu Qin

Vector Databases: From Scalable Search to Data-Centric Agentic Harness Systems

Speaker: Professor Xiaofang Zhou

Abstract

AI-native databases emerge as a foundational database management infrastructure to meet the demands of AI applications. One of its key components is vector databases, which enable efficient storage, indexing, and retrieval of high-dimensional vector embeddings, to support Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and agentic workflows.

Unlike traditional relational databases designed for structured, tabular data, vector databases are optimized for handling complex and unstructured data representations. Efficient similarity search is essential for large vector databases.

In this talk, we will explore data representations, indexing algorithms and search capabilities in vector databases and their applications. We will also discuss the future of vector databases as a core component of agentic harness system.

About the Speaker

Professor Xiaofang Zhou is Otto Poon Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

His work covers database systems, data quality management, big data analytics, machine learning and AI. He served as Program Committee Chair for IEEE ICDE 2013, ACM CIKM 2016, and PVLDB 2020, and was General Chair for ICDE 2025 and ACM Multimedia 2015.

Before joining HKUST in 2021, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Data Science discipline at the University of Queensland. He is a Global STEM Professor of Hong Kong and a Fellow of IEEE.

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UTS AAII Research Seminar