The CITIC Database Laboratory of the Universidade da Coruña organized the sixteenth edition of the International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP), which took place in A Coruña on October 9, 10 and 11. The event attracted attendees from 17 countries, making it a unique opportunity for the exchange of ideas and international collaborations in the area of similarity data management.

SISAP is an annual forum that brings together researchers and application developers in the field of similarity data management. With shared technology problems across a wide range of application domains, from data mining to pattern recognition and biometrics, SISAP has become a key event for professionals from around the world.

During the conference, the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards were presented. At the same time, a small selection of the best papers presented at the conference will be recommended by the organization for inclusion in a special issue of Elsevier Information Systems.

In addition, SISAP 2023 featured three keynote speakers: Michael Houle of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), whose expertise in similarity search is internationally recognized; Yury Malkov, an expert in approximate vector search who has contributed significantly to the field; and Julio Gonzalo of UNED, whose experience in information retrieval and data mining brought a valuable perspective to the conference discussions.

The SISAP Initiative

The SISAP initiative ( www.sisap.org ) is a forum for exchanging real-world application examples, new indexing techniques, common testbeds and benchmarks, source code and updated literature through its website, serving the similarity search community. Traditionally, SISAP emphasizes remote search, but in general the conference addresses both the effectiveness and efficiency aspects of any similarity search problem.

The activity started in 2008 as a workshop and over the years has evolved into an international conference with Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) proceedings.