MOD

Welcome to SIGMOD 2015 -- officially, the 2015 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on the Management of Data! This year's conference is being held in the beautiful cultural capital of Australia, Melbourne. During the Gold Rush period of the 19th Century, Melbourne was the richest city in the world, and as a result it is filled with many unique neighborhoods and distinctive buildings. In addition to wonderful neighborhoods to explore, the city has great museums and other cultural attractions, as well as a fine multi-cultural atmosphere. For those who would like to explore the outdoors, popular highlights are the Phillip Island Nature Park (90 minutes away), which features wild penguins who return in a parade each day at sunset, and the Great Ocean Road, one of the world's most scenic coastal drives, including the famous towering 12 Apostles.

SIGMOD 2015's exciting technical program reflects not only traditional topics, but the database community's role in broader data science and data analytics. The keynote from Laura Haas, "The Power Behind the Throne: Information Integration in the Age of Data-Driven Discovery" highlights the role of database and data integration techniques in the growing field of data science. Jignesh Patel's talk, "From Data to Insights @ Bare Metal Speed," explains how hardware and software need to be co-evolved to support the needs of scalable data analytics. Jennifer Widom, winner of the 2015 ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award for fundamental contributions to computer science, will give her award talk, "Three Favorite Results," on Tuesday. Christopher Ré will lead a panel on "Machine Learning and Databases: The Sound of Things to Come or a Cacophony of Hype?," with participants Divyakant Agrawal, Magdalena Balazinska, Michael Cafarella, Michael Jordan, Tim Kraska, and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Of course, there are also 106 research paper presentations, 4 tutorials, 30 demonstrations, and 18 industrial papers. Papers will be presented both as talks during the research sessions, and as part of plenary Poster Sessions.

SIGMOD 2015 is preceded by the PhD Workshop, as well as workshops on leading-edge topics like data analytics (DanaC), databases and the Web (WebDB), exploratory search (ExploreDB), managing and mining spatial data (GeoRich), and graph data (GRADES); the New Researcher Symposium will take place on Wednesday. The banquet will be held in a Melbourne landmark, the Town Hall.

As in recent years, we had two submission deadlines for SIGMOD this year, one in August and one in November. The review process was journal-style, with multiple rounds of reviews coordinated by the Group Leaders. We accepted 34 of 137 papers from the first deadline and 72 of 278 from the second deadline. The total acceptance rate was about 25.5%, and we believe that the revision processhas improved the quality of the technical program.