MOD

This year, due to the global uncertainties, travel restrictions, and other potential difficulties associated with Covid-19, SIGMOD is being held entirely online, instead of at its originally planned location of Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. The online SIGMOD conference is complemented with a local physical event at Xi'an, primarily targeting the data management community in China. Despite the challenging times that we find ourselves in, we have an exciting technical program with outstanding research, industrial and demonstration track presentations, keynotes, tutorials, panels, and the awards session.

For the first time, SIGMOD is being held round the clock, with each technical talk presented twice 12 hours apart, to better accommodate online participants from around the world, Also, for the first time, presentations are being grouped into curated sessions to give participants a cohesive, single track experience on a variety of leading edge topics in data management. We are using the latest technologies to keep SIGMOD vibrant, and we will be archiving most SIGMOD presentations, for those who want to review them at a later date.

This year, with the approval of the SIGMOD EC, we introduced two new categories of papers in the Research Track, (a) Data Science & Engineering and (b) Applications, to complement the traditional Data Management category. Data Science & Engineering papers focused on dataintensive components of data science pipelines, solving problems in areas of interest to the community inspired by real applications. Applications papers presented novel applications of data management systems and technologies to inspire future research in the community.

In the Research Track this year, we received 450 research submissions (172 for Round 1 and 278 for Round 2), which were extensively reviewed by 175 program committee members, 23 associate editors, and several external reviewers. We accepted 188 submissions (a 41.8% acceptance rate), most of them after a revision phase that gave authors 10+ weeks to revise and resubmit their papers in response to the reviewer comments. This year we introduced a new set of detailed reviewing instructions focused on reviewing constructively as well as redesigned the review forms to promote constructive reviewing. In addition, we introduced a new step in the reviewing process, the Review Quality week where the associate editors check reviews for certain quality criteria and probe reviewers for constructive rewrites before reviews are released to the authors. In addition, the authors were able to provide structured feedback directly to the associate editors and the program chairs about review quality. Overall, more than 300 reviews were updated for quality during this process leading to a higher number of revision requests.

In addition to the Research Track, the Industrial Track selected 21 papers from 54 submissions; the Demonstration Track selected 27 demonstrations from 75 submissions; the Tutorial Track selected 8 tutorials from 20 submissions and the Student Research Competition selected all 18 submissions for the second round of competition.

This year, we will have two exciting keynote talks, reflecting emerging topics of great interest to the data management community: "Utilizing (and Designing) Modern Hardware for Data- Intensive Computations: The Role of Abstraction" by Kenneth A. Ross (Columbia University) and "Deep Data Integration" by Wang-Chiew Tan (Facebook AI). iv In addition, we will have two timely and interesting panels: "Data Management to Social Science and Back in the Future of Work" organized by Sihem Amer-Yahia (CNRS) and Senjuti Basu Roy (New Jersey Institute of Technology), and "Automation of Data Prep, ML, and Data Science: New Cure or Snake Oil?" organized by Arun Kumar (University of California, San Diego).