We are witnessing an unprecedented growth in the amount of data, starting from protein sequences and structures to biomedical images, sensor readings and chemical data. With the improvement in data acquiring technologies, digital databases are becoming a necessity for every scientific discipline.

In order to render the databases more useful than just a digital data storage structure, the ability to search for data objects similar to a query must be supported.

This course will cover the well known searching and indexing techniques used in databases, including the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Since the complexity of these techniques grow exponentially with the number of dimensions in the data, special emphasis will be on highdimensional databases, e.g., multimedia databases.