Time: Friday, September 25th 2020, 12-1 PM

Talk: Relational Knowledge Graphs as the Foundation for Artificial Intelligence

Abstract:
In this talk, I will describe the motivation and architecture of a new kind of cloud-native relational database for knowledge graphs. I will motivate our belief that future enterprise systems will be built using relational knowledge graphs as a foundation.  In such systems, each component or service will either be (1) learned with machine learning or (2) declared and executed via a sophisticated reasoner. After a brief overview of knowledge graphs and the relational paradigm I will describe the foundational design principles and implementation philosophy of the RelationalAI system and how it supports workloads that mix data management, business intelligence, machine learning, reasoning, and graph analytics.

I will explain how we use novel query optimization and query evaluation algorithms that exploit structural properties of the knowledge graph.  These properties may be algebraic (semi-ring), combinatorial (hypertree width) or statistical (sampling).  Performance is further improved by leveraging recent advances in compiler technology that eliminate the cost of abstraction and allows us to specialize the computation for specific workloads and datasets. This translates to orders-of-magnitude speed-up over state-of-the-art systems.  Time permitting, I will also sketch how we build our system on 5 core capabilities that compose elegantly in ways that cover a broad range of use cases, allowing us to build a high-performance database with less time and effort.

Biography:
Molham Aref is the Chief Executive Officer of RelationalAI. He has more than 28 years of experience in leading organizations that develop and implement high value machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions across various industries. Prior to RelationalAI he was CEO of LogicBlox and Predictix (now Infor), Optimi (now Ericsson), and co-founder of Brickstream (now FLIR). Molham held senior leadership positions at HNC Software (now FICO) and Retek (now Oracle).