Prof. Alberto Abelló, and the FIB student, Joel Díaz, won the Best Paper Award at ADBIS 2026 for a work developed in the context of the MLEvol project.

Date: September 28 – October 1, 2026
Location: Orléans, France.

Prof. Alberto Abelló and Joel Díaz received the Best Paper Award at the 30th European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 2026) for the paper “Embedding Generation: Gembed an Open In-Database Extension to Use Them All”, a work developed in the context of the MLEvol project.

The paper presents Gembed, an open architecture for generating embeddings directly within database management systems. Gembed has a portable core written in Rust that can be integrated with different database management systems. For example, its PostgreSQL extension generates embeddings locally in the database, without calling external APIs.

The work originated from Joel Díaz's Bachelor's Thesis at the Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB). The ADBIS 2026 proceedings include 22 full papers selected from 80 submissions.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-39820-8_24
More information: FIB news

Photo: Joel Díaz at the ADBIS 2026 awards ceremony with the Program Committee Chairs Genoveva Vargas-Solar, Themis Palpanas and Kostas Stefanidis (source: FIB).