PODS and ICDT Alan Fekete (University of Sydney) with Assistance from Leonid Libkin and Wim Martens
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The database theory conferences: PODS and ICDT Alan Fekete (University of Sydney) with assistance from Leonid Libkin and Wim Martens Summary This account, presented to CORE’s 2020 conference ranking review, shows the high quality of these conferences focused on theory of data management. PODS and ICDT are the central locations for a community with very high standards, containing many esteemed and impactful researchers. While absolute number of papers and also citation counts are typically lower for theory work than other styles of computer science, the importance of the work, the quality of the work, and the calibre of the community, should justify keeping the current high rankings for these conferences: A* for PODS and A for ICDT, matching the ranking of the larger conferences with which each is collocated. Overview For about 50 years, there has been an active community of researchers looking at issues of data management. After an early period, in which theory and systems aspects were both in focus, the community has been subdivided into systems- and applications-oriented conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE and EDBT that are dominated by systems-building work in the engineering tradition, along with applications of database technologies to new types of data and queries, and conferences looking at foundational issues such as PODS and ICDT. The latter typically publish papers more mathematical in character, and use techniques from many areas such as logic and algorithm design. PODS started in 1982 and ICDT in 1986. From 1991, SIGMOD and PODS combined for a joint ACM SIGMOD/PODS event, the main one on the annual database calendar. Colocation means multiple shared events such as keynotes, poster sessions, and social events; however, PODS technical sessions with contributed papers run separately. From 2009, EDBT and ICDT followed the SIGMOD/PODS scheme, collocating the two conferences. While being held jointly with larger systems conferences, the theory conferences have separate program committees, so that PODS and ICDT programs are selected based on the specialist expertise to judge and value theory work appropriately. For each conference, there is an executive committee or council that persists (with regular turnover), to choose the program chairs each year. See https://sigmod.org/pods-home/pods- organization/ (though this is several months out of date, as Leonid Libkin has joined as Chair of the Executive and Floris Geerts has stepped off) and https://databasetheory.org/ICDT/what-is-icdt Quality of the review and selection process Each conference is small and selective, running with single-track presentations, and ensuring each paper has at least 3 reviews from non-conflicted members of the PC (or invited experts, for cases of papers whose topic is not within the expertise of enough members of the PC). In 2019 PODS accepted 29 full papers from 87 submissions. ICDT 2019 accepted 21 from 67 submissions. Extended versions of the conferences’ top papers are published in leading journals. PODS has a standing arrangement with Journal of the ACM and ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) that highest ranked papers from PODS are invited for publication in these journals (typically 2 in JACM and 2-3 in TODS). ICDT has a similar arrangement with 1-2 papers invited to TODS; also until 2019 3-4 each year were invited to Springer’s Theory of Computing Systems (from 2020, the open-access journal Logical Methods in Computer Science is replacing the Springer journal in this role). Quality and impact of the work The Research Highlight awards from SIGMOD (the ACM SIG, not the conference it runs) seek for the best 5 to 10 papers per year in database research (and which therefore primarily target SIGMOD, VLDB, PODS, ICDE, ICDT, and EDBT, but also call for community nominations) have regularly gone to PODS and ICDT papers. In the last five years, 7 out of 35 research highlight awards have gone to PODS, and 3 to ICDT papers. Foundational work done in these conferences had a significant influence on the practice of databases as evidenced by awarding the main database research award (ACM SIGMOD Edgar Codd Innovation Award) to leaders of the PODS/ICDT community such as Abiteboul, Fagin, and Vardi. Specific examples of impact from excellent work in PODS and ICDT include • differential privacy, where the seminal paper by Dwork et al describes it as “We continue a line of research initiated in [10,11]" where [10] is “Revealing information while preserving privacy” by Dirur and Nissim, from PODS2003 • relationalAI and LogicBlox are shipping platforms for reasoning that are founded on efficient join processing algorithms driven by complexity results; key papers are “Worst-case optimal join algorithms” (PODS 2012), “Leapfrog Triejoin” (ICDT 2014), and “Beyond worst-case analysis for joins with minesweeper” (PODS 2014) • Standards for query languages for graph databases have been directly influenced by theory work. SPARQL 1.1's change of definition of property paths (regular expressions to navigate through RDF graphs) was based on "The complexity of evaluating path expressions in SPARQL" (PODS 2012). The new ISO effort to standardize and integrated GQL is being influenced by “Querying graph databases with XPath” (ICDT 2013) and “Regular Queries on Graph Databases” (ICDT 2015), as shown in https://www.gqlstandards.org/existing-languages Quality of the community The table below contains the members of the current PODS Executive Committee and ICDT Council, together with program chairs for both conferences since 2009. Name Esteem Institution Google Scholar Conference h-index roles Leonid Libkin ACM Fellow; U Edinburgh 56 PODS Executive member of Chair Academia Europaea Dan Suciu ACM Fellow U Washington 86 PODS Executive Jan Van den Hasselt U 36 PODS Executive Bussche Tova Milo ACM Fellow; Tel Aviv U 53 PODS Weizmann Executive; ICDT Prize; member PC Chair (2011) of Academia Europaea Marcelo Arenas Associate Editor Pontificia 47 PODS of ACM TODS Universidad Executive; Católica de PODS PC Chair Chile (2018); ICDT PC Chair (2015) Christoph Koch member of EPFL 47 PODS Academia Executive; Europaea PODS PC Chair (2019) Yufei Tao ACM Chinese 68 PODS PC Chair Distinguished University of (2020) Member (will Hong Kong be announced as ACM Fellow in 2020 round) Floris Geerts U Antwerp 36 PODS PC Chair (2017) Wang-Chiew ACM Fellow Megagon Labs 42 PODS PC Chair Tan (2016) Diego ACM Fellow Free University 72 PODS PC Chair Calvanese of Bozen- (2015) Bolzano Martin Grohe ACM Fellow Aachen 49 PODS PC Chair University (2014) Wenfei Fan ACM Fellow; Edinburgh U 56 PODS PC Chair member of (2013) Academia Europaea Michael Oxford U 37 PODS PC Chair Benedikt (2012); ICDT PC Chair (2017) Thomas member of TU Dortmund 43 PODS PC Chair Schwentick Academia (2011) Europaea Dirk Van Gucht Indiana U 35 PODS PC Chair (2010) Jianwen Su UC Santa 50 PODS PC Chair Barbara (2009) Wim Martens Associate Editor U Bayreuth 29 ICDT Council of ACM TODS Chair; ICDT PC Chair (2016) Pablo Barceló Pontificia 26 ICDT Council; Universidad ICDT PC Chair Católica de (2019) Chile Angela Bonifati Associate Editor Lyon 1 30 ICDT Council of ACM TODS University Benny Kimelfeld Technion 27 ICDT Council; ICDT PC Chair (2018) Carsten Lutz U Bremen 57 ICDT Council; ICDT PC Chair (2020) Norman Paton member of U Manchester 58 ICDT Council Academia Europaea Ke Yi Associate Editor HKUST 42 ICDT Council of ACM TODS Nicole Humbolt U 21 ICDT PC Chair Schweikardt (2014) Alin Deutsch UC San Diego 39 ICDT PC Chair (2012) Luc Segoufin ENS Ulm, INRIA (no profile), ICDT PC Chair approx. 35 (2010) determined manually Ron Fagin ACM Fellow; IBM Almaden 75 ICDT PC Chair IEEE Fellow; (2009) IBM Fellow; Godel Prize Where they publish The list of people above was processed with CORE’s where-people-publish tool. The top 20 results follow, for each of conferences and journals (for some reason, the tool failed to find Jan Van den Bussche, despite the name being copied-pasted from his DBLP entry!). This clearly shows the community centres its work in PODS and ICDT, as well as the journal ACM TODS (which deals with both systems and theory, and also publishes extended versions of best papers from both conferences), although a significant number also publish in the leading systems- and application-centred database conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB (listed as a journal PVLDB) and ICDE, while some are active in the leading AI conferences like AAAI and IJCAI, and others in strong theory forums such as JACM and LICS. Conferences that published the following experts: Benny Kimelfeld, Alin Deutsch, Tova Milo, Christoph Koch 0001, Dirk Van Gucht, Diego Calvanese, Norman W. Paton, Ke Yi 0001, Luc Segoufin, Pablo Barceló, Yufei Tao, Jianwen Su, Michael Benedikt, Leonid Libkin, Ronald Fagin, Marcelo Arenas, Martin Grohe, Floris Geerts, Nicole Schweikardt, Wang Chiew Tan, Angela Bonifati, Dan Suciu, Carsten Lutz, Wim Martens, Thomas Schwentick, Wenfei Fan Ranking order is first by number of the above people publishing in the venue, then by number of their publications, then by number of years with at least one publication from these people. 1. ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) ______________________________________________________________________________ This conference was published at 76 times by 22 of 27 experts in the last 5 years. The experts that publish at this conference are: Benny Kimelfeld(14), Martin Grohe(4), Tova Milo(2), Christoph Koch 0001(2), Dirk Van Gucht(3), Ke Yi 0001(4), Luc Segoufin(3),