MOD

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to SIGMOD 2016, the 2016 edition of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, at San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley. A unique bridge, cable cars, a sparkling bay, a famous prison, and steep streets with beautiful Victorian houses are just a few of the things that make San Francisco one of the world's greatest cities to visit. Located in the Bay Area along the Northern California coast, many attractions beyond those in the city can be easily reached: the world-famous wine country, including Napa and Sonoma Valley, beautiful beaches, the world's largest trees and wonderful hikes in nearby National Parks.

The conference itself is held in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, located in the financial district in downtown San Francisco. The hotel is very conveniently located nearby to many activities and landmarks, making this the ideal spot not only for an exciting conference but also for exploring the area. The banquet will be held in the California Academy of Sciences. The California Academy of Sciences is a Planetarium, Aquarium and Natural History Museum under a Living Roof in San Francisco, and it is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 26 million specimens.

This year's technical program features 137 papers in 22 sessions; 116 research papers, 17 industrial papers, and 4 invited papers. Research and industrial papers will be mixed together instead of separated into separate tracks as in past years. All papers will be presented at conference sessions, as well as at one of two plenary poster events. There are also 31 demos and 10 tutorials. Instead of running these bconcurrently with technical presentations, demos are now a separate plenary event in the conference and tutorials have been moved before and after the conference. There is just one panel, the Careers in Industry panel. Finally, this year's conference will feature one keynote, from the inimitable Jeff Dean (Google, USA), who will talk about how deep learning and software systems can support each other, with particular thoughts on the implications for data management. The net effect of these changes is that there are more plenary events, and at most three concurrent events ongoing (from 6 or more concurrent tracks in previous conferences). We hope this will make the SIGMOD experience more communal.

Other technical events of interest include the SIGMOD programming contest, featuring a $7,000 prize for the winning team plus a $3,000 dollar prize for the runner-up donated by Microsoft, with contest participants presenting their work during the poster session; the undergraduate poster competition, featuring 12 undergraduate posters from an outstanding group of young database researchers; the new research symposium on Tuesday night; and the business meeting, also on Tuesday evening.

We made a number of changes in the way we assembled this year's technical program with an eye towards improving review and paper quality. As in past years we had two submission deadlines, but we spread them out more (one in July and one in November). Each submission included one round of revisions, during which reviewers could request specific changes to papers. The vast majority of accepted papers underwent revision, which we believe significantly improved the quality of papers. All submissions were also discussed in a series of conference calls organized by our group leaders; this forced reviewers to defend their positions and helped achieve consensus. A post-review survey revealed 70% of reviewers felt this improved the review process, and 80% reported they worked harder in preparing and defending their reviews. We also asked reviewers and group leaders to request additional reviews when an additional opinion was needed; many papers received four reviews, and some papers received as many as six. Finally, we introduced an online conference organization tool, Confer, which we used to get the community's input about how papers should be grouped together, and which attendees can use throughout the conference to navigate the program. SIGMOD 2016 is preceded and followed by 10 workshops, including the PhD symposium on Sunday, June 26. These workshops provide an opportunity for small groups of like-minded researchers to discuss areas of interest and new ideas, and we are pleased to see a diverse ecosystem of workshops with competitive submissions evolving at SIGMOD.