Seminar ''SQL and Large Language Models: A Marriage Made in Heaven?''

Dear PhD Students,

You are kindly invited to participate in the seminar titled 'SQL and Large Language Models: A Marriage Made in Heaven?' delivered by Paolo Papotti (Eurecom - FR). The event will take place on the 30th of October 2023 at 10:00 in the meeting room located on the first floor of MO27.

Abstract:
With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of documents. However, for data-intensive tasks over structured data, relational DBs and SQL queries are at the core of countless applications. While these two technologies may appear distant, in this talk we will see that they can interact effectively and with very promising results. LLMs can help users express SQL queries (Semantic Parsing), but SQL queries can be used to evaluate LLMs (Benchmarking). Their combination can be further advanced, with opportunities to query with the a unified SQL interface both LLMs and DBs. We present recent results on these topics and then conclude with an overview of the research challenges that must be addressed to build solutions that effectively leverage the combined power of SQL and LLMs.

Bio:
Paolo Papotti is an Associate Professor at EURECOM, France since 2017. He got his PhD from Roma Tre University (Italy) in 2007 and had research positions at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Qatar) and Arizona State University (USA). His research is focused on data management and information quality. He has authored more than 140 publications, and his work has been recognized with two “Best of the Conference” citations (SIGMOD 2009, VLDB 2016), three best demo award (SIGMOD 2015, DBA 2020, SIGMOD 2022), and two Google Faculty Research Award (2016, 2020).