EVENTS

Professor Bast completed her Ph.D. and Habilitation at the MPI for Informatics in Saarbrücken. She is a professor for computer science at the University of Freiburg since 2009. Her research focus is on all kinds of intelligent search in large data sets, with and without AI. The search technology developed in her group is used worldwide on a daily basis. During an extended research stay at Google, she developed a new public transport route planner for Google Maps. She has served as Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, and is still serving as Dean of Studies and Senator of the university. She was a member of the German Bundestag's Enquete Commission on Artificial Intelligence. She is a member of the committee that is responsible for the evaluation of the German Leibniz Institutes. She has received various research and teaching awards.

She is going to talk about QLever, which is a new SPARQL engine and triple store developed by her group, with several unique features. Notably, QLever is very fast, can handle hundreds of billions of triples on a standard PC, supports the incremental construction of SPARQL queries via context-sensitive autocompletion, supports SPARQL+Text queries on text linked to a knowledge graph, and supports very fast spatial joins on very large numbers of geometric objects as well as the visualization of very many such objects on a map. She will show many examples and demos, some performance comparisons with other engines, and will also take a look at what's under the hood. If time permits, she might also talk about the automatic translation of natural language questions to SPARQL queries via large language models, and about entity linking . Also a word or two about the rewards and challenges of writing and maintaining software that actually works in academia.

Institutions

• Leuphana Universität Lüneburg