Message from the ICDE 2020 Chairs

Since its inception in 1984, the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) has become a premier forum for the exchange and dissemination of data management research results among researchers, practitioners, developers, educators and users. Continuing this long-standing tradition, the 36th ICDE was to be hosted this year in Dallas, TX, USA, from April 20 to April 24, 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 world pandemic it is extremely unfortunate that we are unable to host this prestigious event in person and face-to-face. Nevertheless, due to the diligent and hard work of the organizing committee, IEEE, the ICDE Steering committee and the ICDE Technical committee, and in particular the authors and presenters, we have been able to pull together all parts of the conference and host the event virtually for the first time in the history of IEEE ICDE. All the events will be held online from April 20 to April 24, USA Central Daylight Time (CDT). We welcome you to the virtual meeting of ICDE 2020.

We received 568 submissions for the Research track (in two submission rounds), 57 submissions for the Industrial track, 39 demonstration proposals, and 10 tutorial proposals.

The Research track had 24 vice chairs and 212 program committee members. The Research track vice chairs were Barbara Carminati, Badrish Chandramouli, Reynold Cheng, Jens Dittrich, Avigdor Gal, Jonathan Goldstein, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Takahiro Hara. Herodotos Herodotou, Latifur Khan, Wang-Chien Lee, Viktor Leis, Chang-Tien Lu, Nikos Mamoulis, Mohamed Mokbel, Felix Naumann, Themis Palpanas, Panagiotis Papapetrou, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Kenneth Ross, Cyrus Shahabi, Steven Whang, Li Xiong, and Jeffrey Xu Yu.

Each paper was assigned to three program committee members, and one vice chair managed the review/discussion/decision process for each paper. Vice chairs managed papers across multiple areas of their interest.

The Industrial track was chaired by Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft Research), Jingren Zhou (Alibaba), and LV (Venkat) Subramaniam (IBM Research India), and had 23 PC members. The Demonstrations track was chaired by Cuneyt Akcora, Angela Bonifati and Dacheng Tao, and had 20 PC members. Anna Squicciarini and Meikang Qui were Panel co-chairs, while the Tutorial co-chairs were Jayant Haritsa and Vana Kalagoraki.

The final program features 129 full papers (acceptance rate of 22.7% out of 568 submissions), and a further 55 papers from the same set of submissions were chosen as short papers (posters). The Industrial track features 15 papers (acceptance rate of 26% out of 57 submissions), while the Demonstrations track features 16 demos (acceptance rate of 41% out of 39 submissions). Out of 10 tutorial proposals, 6 were chosen on interesting and timely topics. The Poster sessions also include posters for selected papers from those accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) during the past year; extended abstracts of these papers are published as part of the ICDE proceedings. This category includes 14 posters chosen from 17 submissions, and the selection was done by the TKDE Poster chairs, Latifur Khan, Donatella Firmani, and Bin Cui.

We have invited four keynote speakers, who are all internationally renowned researchers in the area of data management: Johannes Gehrke (Microsoft), Sharad Mehrotra (University of California, Irvine), Joe Hellerstein (University of California, Berkeley) and Vipin Kumar (University of Minnesota).

Five workshops were scheduled on the first day of the conference, coordinated by the Workshop co-chairs Mohamed Mokbel and Chris Clifton, while the Ph.D. Symposium was chaired by Jeffrey Xu Yu, Latifur Khan, and Feng Chen. In addition, we are organizing a special event on April 24th, the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Day, as an ambassador to Stanford University’s WiDS initiative to motivate and encourage more women to participate in future IEEE ICDE events.

We would like to thank the Program Committee members and vice chairs of the Research track for their insightful reviews and extensive discussions leading to final decisions on the papers. We would also like to thank the Program chairs of the Industrial track, Surajit Chaudhuri, Jingren Zhou, and LV Subramaniam, as well as the Program Committee members of the Industrial track; the Demonstration track chairs, Cuneyt Akcora, Angela Bonifati, and Dacheng Tao, as well as the Program Committee members of the Demo track; the Tutorial chairs, Hayant Haritsa and Vana Kalogeraki; the Workshop chairs, Mohamed Mokbel and Chris Clifton; and the TKDE Poster chairs, Latifur Khan, Donatella Firmani, and Bin Cui, for all the hard work they have done in putting together the program.

We would also like to thank the Publication co-chairs Shu-Ching Chen and Karuna Joshi for putting together the proceedings, with excellent support from Lisa O’Conner of IEEE.

We also thank the members of the Organizing Committee, in particular the Local Arrangements chair Rhonda Walls, Web chair Aparna Shrivastava, and Finance chair Yun Huang; Registration chair Weili Wu, Publicity co-chairs Mohamad al Hasan, Bin Yang and Lijun Chang, and Sponsorship co-chairs Sharad Mehrotra, Selcuk Kandan, and Lei Chen. We also acknowledge the support from our sponsors.

We would like to thank the team from IEEE, in particular Carmen Salida, who was our IEEE Computer Society program manager, and in particular Patrick Kellenberger for his excellent technical help and guidance in taking ICDE 2020 online in virtual mode. IEEE graciously agreed to make non-author registration free, and to a reduced rate for author registrations. We also wish to thank all the students who volunteered at short notice to help with technical management of the virtual sessions, as well as the session chairs.

Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to ICDE 2020, particularly those among them whose work was presented at ICDE, for all their hard work, and all the participants who joined us virtually; ICDE happens only because of you!

There are many challenges to organizing a conference virtually, and we had to figure out many things within just a few weeks after it was decided to run the conference virtually on the scheduled dates, instead of postponing it as was being considered earlier. We thank the authors and keynote and tutorial speakers for agreeing to do their talks virtually, despite a very short notice. Our goal is to run the conference in a way that replicates an in-person conference as best as we can, including live sessions for all keynotes, research and industrial papers, and tutorials. Given the constraints, demonstrations and posters (including TKDE posters) were made asynchronous, with recorded videos made available to participants, with support for discussions on each session. Since we are learning on the fly, things may not be perfect, but we are striving to do as well as we can under the circumstances.

We hope you enjoy the first ever virtual IEEE ICDE conference!

 

PC Chairs
Dimitrios Gunopulos, Murat Kantarcioglu, and S. Sudarshan

General Chairs
Elena Ferrari, Rao Kotagiri, and Bhavani Thuraisingham