Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data

It is our great pleasure to share with you the proceedings of SIGMOD 2017, the 2017 edition of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, in Chicago. The "City in a Garden" is renown for the birth of modern architecture, beautiful public beaches and parks, world-class museums, comedy clubs, blues, and top-rated restaurants. As the third largest city in the United States, attractions for all interests can be found, from attending a symphony performance to having a Chicago-style hot dog at Wrigley Field. The conference itself was held in the Hilton Chicago, located in the South Loop overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan. The hotel is conveniently located close to many great attractions. Within a short mwalk you can find the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Center, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, the blues club Buddy Guy's Legends, the newly opened river walk, Cloud Gate ("the Bean"), and Millennium Park. Architectural boat tours originating at Navy Pier offer a great way to see the city. This year's technical program features 105 papers in 32 sessions; 96 research papers, 4 industrial papers, and 5 invited keynote papers. We made several changes: 1) We scheduled two plenary keynote sessions on Grand Challenges in Data Management, one session on Transactions, and one session on Approximate Query Processing (AQP). These sessions enabled the SIGMOD community to discuss and debate some of the core research challenges that unify and define our field. We invited Anastasia Ailamaki and Andy Pavlo to talk about transactions, and Surajit Chaudhuri, Barzan Mozafari, and Tim Kraska to talk about AQP. 2) The industrial papers were by invitation only: the industrial chairs, Joe Hellerstein and Mehul Shah, selected four papers from Amazon, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. 3) We added a plenary Teaser Talks session, where each presenter gave a 1-minute teaser talk in front of the entire SIGMOD audience. This session allowed the audience to have a high level view of the conference, and to decide which of the five parallel research sessions to attend. 4) Every research and industrial paper had a 25 minutes slot for the talk and questions. 5) Finally, every paper was presented in a plenary poster session. The selection of the technical program proceeded as follows. The Program Committee consisted of a Program Chair, two Program Vice Chairs, 14 area leaders, and 163 Program Committee Members. There were two rounds of submissions, with deadlines in July and in November, respectively. Initially, each paper received three reviews, then a decision was made whether to solicit a fourth review in cases where the reviewers did not have enough confidence, or where there was a significant score discrepancy in the first three reviews. Papers were extensively discussed online, and, in some cases, the discussions were followed up by teleconferences. This year we allowed the entire PC to view all submitted papers and reviews (except for conflicts) to encourage more discussions. We believe this led to more consistency in the reviewing standards as well. While the entire program committee worked hard to select an excellent program, the chairs and area leaders are especially grateful to the following mcommittee members for their very high quality work on the committee: Michael Benedikt, Sudipto Das, Rainer Gemulla, Yaron Kanza, Raghav Kaushik, Arun Kumar, Wolfgang Lehner, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Stefan Manegold, Tamer Ozsu, Andy Pavlo, Sudeepa Roy, Pierre Senellart, Ryan Stutsman, Arash Termehchy, and Yannis Velegrakis.