Dataset Discovery

Machine learning engineering (MLE) agents are emerging as a new paradigm for automating end-to-end ML pipeline development. Using large language models for code generation and predictive performance as a machine-gradable feedback signal, these agents iteratively synthesize, execute, and refine pipeline code. Yet current systems are largely evaluated on pre-built, single-table benchmarks that abstract away key data management challenges. This tutorial introduces the foundations of MLE agents and highlights research opportunities for the database community. We cover how agents combine program synthesis with iterative and evolutionary optimization, and discuss open challenges in efficient pipeline execution, data discovery and augmentation over heterogeneous sources, reliability and debugging, as well as fairness and compliance. We connect these challenges to existing data management techniques and conclude with a hands-on session using contemporary MLE agents.

Data-centric agents repeatedly perform a discovery step before planning or execution: identifying the data objects relevant to a task. Yet successful discovery outcomes are typically discarded rather than reused. We introduce persistent discovery context, a lightweight memory layer that stores prior intent-to-object mappings and reuses them to augment future retrieval. Across three structured data environments, persistent discovery context consistently improves retrieval quality over metadata-only search, remains effective with automatically generated memories, and exposes a reproducible interference failure mode. In lexically sparse domains, memory-only retrieval can even outperform metadata-based retrieval. These findings suggest that discovery outcomes constitute a useful form of reusable context for data-centric agents.

Latin America is missing two foundational layers of AI infrastructure: the dataset layer and the benchmark layer. This paper targets the dataset layer. The dataset layer faces two compounding problems: discovery and supply. Latin American AI datasets exist but are scattered across platforms with no shared index. Even with perfect indexing, the total volume would remain far below what frontier AI development requires. We propose DataHub: a task-first data infrastructure organized through the ontology /<task?>/<domain?>/<language?>, with mechanisms for dataset discovery, metadata, contribution, licensing, and reuse.

With rapid growth in the fields of empirical and computational aesthetics we have seen a vast increase in large image datasets annotated for aesthetics. As the image databases differ widely in many respects (e.g., different standards for annotation), it can be tedious to find the dataset that fits one's research needs best. The absence of a centralized open-science search system causes additional problems. Currently, researchers typically share dataset links in papers or on diverse platforms like OSF, GitHub or Dropbox. Manually searching for details like image quality and content often requires downloading all datasets. Therefore, we present the Database Of Datasets for Aesthetics (DODA), an intuitive Web application in which researchers can browse all important datasets for aesthetics research. DODA provides general information about these datasets (size, resolution, type of annotation, number of annotators, etc.) and for many of them also precomputed quantitative image properties. We discuss relevant criteria for selecting a suitable dataset with DODA and illustrate the benefits of reusing datasets. Our approach facilitates collaboration across the fields of empirical and computational aesthetics. Keywords: empirical aesthetics, computational aesthetics, machine learning, image annotation, quantitative image properties, Open Science

NASA and its data centers hold thousands of geoscience datasets and tools like Worldview, Giovanni, the Science Discovery Engine, and Harmony. Finding the right one is hard even for domain experts. We present an agentic search system, deployed as a public service for the geoscience community, that takes a natural-language research query and returns the matching datasets and tools. We demonstrate that, in the era of large language models, the latent value of knowledge graphs (KGs) can be substantially amplified through agentic search. From the NASA Earth Observation Knowledge Graph (NASA EO-KG) we derive NASA-EO-Bench, an open benchmark of 47k query-dataset pairs (21k task-based queries). A neural scorer fine-tuned on NASA-EO-Bench beats cosine and BM25 baselines. Further combining it with BM25 via score fusion raises both Recall@10 (R@10) and MRR by over 5x. On top of this supervised pipeline, we add a zero-shot agentic reranking stage that, without any additional training, lifts MRR by 28% on a stratified N=200 subset, showing that LLM reasoning is complementary to supervised retrieval.

Multilingual NLP often relies on dataset counts from centralized catalogues to characterize which languages are resource-rich or resource-poor. However, these catalogues record only one layer of dataset visibility: what has been registered or institutionally distributed. They do not necessarily reflect which datasets are created, cited, or reused in the research literature. To examine this gap, we combine a catalogue-based baseline with literature-backed evidence of dataset circulation. We introduce the Resource Density Index (RDI), defined as the number of catalogued datasets per one million speakers, and compute it for the 200 most widely spoken languages in Ethnologue. Among them, 118 languages (59%) have an average RDI of zero across the LRE Map and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), and another 23 fall below 0.1, corresponding to at most one catalogued dataset per ten million speakers. We then apply an LLM-assisted citation-mining pipeline over the Semantic Scholar corpus to these 141 low-visibility languages. After manual validation and consolidation, we identify 609 unique datasets across 53 languages, of which 356 remain openly accessible through working public links. These results reveal a substantial visibility gap: many large-speaker languages appear data-poor in catalogue records yet show clear evidence of dataset activity in the research literature. Our findings suggest that multilingual data scarcity should be understood not only as a production problem, but also as a question of documentation, discoverability, and long-term accessibility. Code and data are publicly available at (https://github.com/zhiyintan/dataset-visibility-asymmetry).

Croissant has emerged as the metadata standard for machine learning datasets, providing a structured, JSON-LD-based format that makes dataset discovery, automated ingestion, and reproducible analysis machine-checkable across ML platforms. Adoption has accelerated, and NeurIPS now requires Croissant metadata in every submission to its dataset tracks. Yet in practice Croissant generation usually starts with uploading data to a public platform, a path infeasible for governed and large local repositories that hold much of the high-value data ML increasingly relies on. We release Croissant Baker, a local-first, open-source command-line tool that generates validated Croissant metadata directly from a dataset directory through a modular handler registry. We evaluate Croissant Baker on over 140 datasets, scaling to MIMIC-IV at 886 million rows and 374 Parquet files. On held-out comparisons against producer-authored or standards-derived ground truth, Croissant Baker reaches 97-100% agreement across multiple domains.

The proliferation of data across the system lifecycle presents both a significant opportunity and a challenge for Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (EDSE). While this "digital thread" has the potential to drive innovation, the fragmented and inaccessible nature of existing datasets hinders method validation, limits reproducibility, and slows research progress. Unlike fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, which benefit from established benchmark ecosystems, engineering design research often relies on small, proprietary, or ad-hoc datasets. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a systematic framework for a "Map of Datasets in EDSE." The framework is built upon a multi-dimensional taxonomy designed to classify engineering datasets by domain, lifecycle stage, data type, and format, enabling faceted discovery. An architecture for an interactive discovery tool is detailed and demonstrated through a working prototype, employing a knowledge graph data model to capture rich semantic relationships between datasets, tools, and publications. An analysis of the current data landscape reveals underrepresented areas ("data deserts") in early-stage design and system architecture, as well as relatively well-represented areas ("data oases") in predictive maintenance and autonomous systems. The paper identifies key challenges in curation and sustainability and proposes mitigation strategies, laying the groundwork for a dynamic, community-driven resource to accelerate data-centric engineering research.

The continuous expansion of open data platforms and research repositories has led to a fragmented dataset ecosystem, posing significant challenges for cross-source data discovery and interpretation. To address these challenges, we introduce SeDa--a unified framework for dataset discovery, semantic annotation, and multi-entity augmented navigation. SeDa integrates more than 7.6 million datasets from over 200 platforms, spanning governmental, academic, and industrial domains. The framework first performs semantic extraction and standardization to harmonize heterogeneous metadata representations. On this basis, a topic-tagging mechanism constructs an extensible tag graph that supports thematic retrieval and cross-domain association, while a provenance assurance module embedded within the annotation process continuously validates dataset sources and monitors link availability to ensure reliability and traceability. Furthermore, SeDa employs a multi-entity augmented navigation strategy that organizes datasets within a knowledge space of sites, institutions, and enterprises, enabling contextual and provenance-aware exploration beyond traditional search paradigms. Comparative experiments with popular dataset search platforms, such as ChatPD and Google Dataset Search, demonstrate that SeDa achieves superior coverage, timeliness, and traceability. Taken together, SeDa establishes a foundation for trustworthy, semantically enriched, and globally scalable dataset exploration.