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SIGMOD'2000 Program Chair's Message
Dear Fellow SIGMOD Members,
It is my pleasure to write a few brief remarks here summarizing
comments I made at the business lunch in Dallas.
I would like to begin by expressing my sincere thanks to the people
who made my job as PC chair possible, and who are responsible for the
high quality program we enjoyed at SIGMOD.
The Program Committee Members had to review approximately 20
submissions each. Every one of the PC members completed every
assigned review before the PC meeting (although some on the PC gave me
some anxious moments!) I am truly grateful for the time, energy, and
expertise each PC member put into this job.
Phil Bernstein and the members of his Industrial Program Committee
did a great job soliciting and reviewing submissions for the
Industrial Program. Similarly, Jiawei Han and his Demo Program
Committee put together a first rate program of demos. Svein-Olaf
Hvasshovd selected a great series of tutorials, while Alon
Levy selected and assembled a great series of panels.
I would also like to thank Surajit Chaudhuri and the Microsoft
Conference Management Toolkit staff for writing, maintaining, and
running the software that managed the submission and review process.
Finally, I would like to thank each of the authors of the 248
submissions to the conference. As PC chair one truly begins to
understand the number of active people in our community and the
quantity and quality of work that they do. Obviously, the conference
depends at its core on these authors.
Moving on, I will present a few statistics about the submissions to
the SIGMOD 2000 research track. Overall, there were 248 submissions,
of which 42 were accepted, for an acceptance ratio of 17%.
For a little history, we had:
| 1999: |
205 submissions, |
42 accepted |
| 1998: |
246 submissions, |
42 accepted |
| 1997: |
202 submissions, |
42 accepted |
| 1996: |
290 submissions, |
47 accepted |
It will be interesting to see if this pattern holds; if so, Timos should
receive approximately 200 submissions to SIGMOD 2001.
SIGMOD 2000 was truly an international conference. By region, our
submissions break down was:
| North America: |
146 |
| South America: |
3 |
| Europe: |
57 |
| Asia: |
42 |
Over 40% of the submissions came from outside North America.
By submission count, the three most popular areas and their acceptance
rates were:
| Data Mining: |
9 /39 |
23% |
| XML/Web: |
7/29 |
24% |
| Query Opt./Eval: |
5/26 |
19% |
Some areas turned out to be particularly tough:
| OLAP: |
0/10 |
0% |
| IR: |
1/10 |
10% |
| Data Integration: |
1/9 |
11% |
Let me close with some changes I think our community should be
considering with respect to the SIGMOD research program.
First, we reject too many papers! A fundamental question we should
address is whether to increase the number of papers in the conference.
Issues to consider are proceedings space, conference talk slots
(although I am personally partial to having 100 parallel sessions in
the first hour of the first day then letting everyone schmooze for the
remainder of the conference), and a loss of prestige due to becoming
less selective.
Second, the web has opened up the potential for new mechanisms in the
reviewing process. Most interestingly, it would be possible to
incorporate a round of author response in the loop. It could work
something like this: 2 weeks before the PC meeting, all reviews are
due. Authors could then read their reviews and prepare a one page
response. Then this response could be included with the reviews
during the PC meeting. The idea is that this can improve the
reviewing process by giving the authors a chance to clarify
misconceptions in their reviews. I have bounced this idea off a
number of you already, and reactions have ranged from great enthusiasm
to complete horror, with more reactions on the side of enthusiasm than
horror.
Finally, I would like to thank those of the SIGMOD community who roped
me into this job, especially Rick Snodgrass, who is the epitome of a
great SIGMOD chair. It was an honor to serve as PC chair, and I look
forward to seeing many of you also experience this honor in the
future.
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