The 2021 edition of EDBT/ICDT took place online, and featured a session on climate change, the second one taking place at that conference. I chaired this session, and we had the pleasure of having Benjamin Pierce (University of Pennsylvania and Clowdr CIC) as an outside guest.

The session gathered up to 40 participants. It featured a presentation that summarized the issue of climate change and the previous climate change session, as well as the report written as a conclusion of that session. Then, we had a discussion featuring members of the community and Benjamin Pierce. Several topics came up during the discussion:

• The TCS4F manifesto, and whether EDBT/ICDT ought to sign it.
• Whether to require authors to travel to future conference editions, or make video presentation a guaranteed option. This relates to Vardi’s column in 2020 (and its followup), and the two-year experiment by TCRTS on making all conferences hybrid for two years, allowing remote attendance by paper authors.
• The impact on climate change that our community can have, in addition to flying less (when it becomes possible again). About this, Benjamin Pierce pointed out the paper outlining how machine learning research can help address climate change issues.
• The impact of online conferences on networking for early-career researchers. There are no easy answers here, but online conferences also make it possible for more people to attend, including people that would not have otherwise had the funding or the opportunity to travel. There is a post on the SIGPLAN blog about the specific topic of early-career researchers.
• The right format to adopt for conferences in the future, including the options of merging conferences, splitting them up geographically, thematically, etc. About this, there is again a relevant post on the SIGPLAN blog.
• The need for statistics to understand how people engage with online conferences, including how many participants actually attended sessions etc.
• (In follow-up discussion:) the question of estimating the carbon footprint of trips avoided thanks to online conference editions.
• The challenges in giving a social aspect to online conferences, which are the topic of ongoing research, and are being addressed by Benjamin Pierce’s Clowdr platform.
• The format of hybrid conferences, and the fact (pointed out by Benjamin Pierce) that once conferences stop being fully online by necessity then they will have to be hybrid by necessity, for several months if not years.
• The question of timezones when organizing online conferences. There are no straightforward solutions to this problem, but the switch to online conferences has encouraged experimentation with the format, e.g., having very short days or even a weekly meeting instead of contiguous full days.
• The switch at SIGPLAN to the PACM series for proceedings, to make conference publications more similar to journal publications, and decouple them somewhat from the physical conference. PACM is used by almost all SIGPLAN conferences.

The session concluded with a poll to gauge the opinion of the audience. At that stage of the session, there were only 16-21 people voting, so this is only informative. We asked:

• Do you agree that EDBT/ICDT should adapt its practices (post-COVID) to mitigate climate change?
  • 15 answered yes, 4 were unsure, no one answered no
• Do you believe that EDBT/ICDT should commit to the IPCC goals of reducing our emissions by at least 50% before 2030 (relative to pre-2020 levels)?
  • 10 answered yes, 6 were unsure, 1 answered no
• Should EDBT/ICDT authors be guaranteed that they do not have to physically travel to the conference (if they cannot or do not want to)?
  • 11 answered yes, 3 were unsure, 2 answered no
• Would you personally be ready, in future years, to only physically travel to EDBT/ICDT every other year (and reduce your emissions by 50%)?
  • 12 answered yes, 7 were unsure, 2 answered no
• What is your preferred model for EDBT/ICDT in the (post-COVID) future?
  • 15 preferred an on-site conference every year but with high-quality remote participation
  • 3 preferred an online conference every year, but with one or many attractive “hubs”
  • 2 preferred to alternate between on-site and online
  • no one wanted to return to business as usual, or to move to “something else”

I hope that we can continue this discussion about the future of the conference model, so that we can transition to a sustainable model that serves the goals of our community. To discuss the issue of climate change specifically, you can use the acm-climate mailing-list, and you can also follow to the TCS4F blog.

The Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) of the University of Trento is looking for a PhD candidate in the research area of "Data Intelligence" (the deadline is by mid April).

The interested candidate would work with me on "Knowledge-enriched data management", a field of Artificial Intelligence that lies at the intersection of data management and knowledge representation and reasoning. Major challenges in this field include the development of effective methodologies for querying data that is enriched with semantic knowledge in the form of ontologies. Although the theoretical aspects of these issues are well-understood by now, more practical aspects of most of these approaches have remained largely unexplored.

The main goal will be to fill this gap with the analysis of the current literature, and the development of original algorithmic solutions aimed at efficient implementations of these methodologies. The above solutions will be then implemented in software and experimentally evaluated. We also envision the possibility to employ machine learning techniques to improve the quality and efficiency of such solutions.

The candidate should have good problem solving and algorithmic implementation skills. Moreover, some familiarity with database systems and logic is preferred.

The candidate will have the opportunity to collaborate with me as well as with other researchers of internationally recognized research groups.
This is a 3 year position, fully funded.

If interested, do not hesitate to contact me.

Contact Details: Marco Calautti - marco [dot] calautti [at] unitn [dot] it

PODS 2021 accepted papers (from both submission cycles):

Albert Atserias and Phokion Kolaitis
Structure and Complexity of Bag Consistency

A. Pavan, N. V. Vinodchandran, Arnab Bhattacharya and Kuldeep S. Meel
Model Counting meets F0 Estimation

Batya Kenig and Dan Suciu
A Dichotomy for the Generalized Model Counting Problem for Unions of Conjunctive Queries

Charles Paperman, Filip Murlak and Corentin Barloy
Stackless Processing of Streamed Trees

Christian Konrad
Frequent Elements with Witnesses in Data Streams

Christoph Berkholz and Maximilian Merz
Probabilistic Databases under Updates: Boolean Query Evaluation and Ranked Enumeration

Floris Geerts, Thomas Muñoz, Cristian Riveros and Domagoj Vrgoc
Expressive Power of Linear Algebra Query Languages

Graham Cormode, Charlie Dickens and David P. Woodruff
Subspace Exploration: Bounds on Projected Frequency Estimation

Graham Cormode, Zohar Karnin, Edo Liberty, Justin Thaler and Pavel Vesely
Relative Error Streaming Quantiles

Heba Aamer, Jan Hidders, Jan Paredaens and Jan Van den Bussche
Expressiveness within Sequence Datalog

Marco Calautti, Marco Console and Andreas Pieris
Benchmarking Approximate Consistent Query Answering

Marco Console, Phokion Kolaitis and Andreas Pieris
Model-theoretic Characterizations of Rule-based Ontologies

Markus L. Schmid and Nicole Schweikardt
Spanner Evaluation over SLP-Compressed Documents

Matthias Lanzinger
Tractability Beyond β-Acyclicity for Conjunctive Queries with Negation

Miao Qiao and Yufei Tao
Two-Attribute Skew Free, Isolated CP Theorem, and Massively Parallel Joins

Michael Shekelyan, Graham Cormode and Minos Garofalakis
Data-Independent Space Partitionings for Summaries

Nina Mesing Stausholm
Improved Differentially Private Euclidean Distance Approximation

Nofar Carmeli, Martin Grohe, Peter Lindner and Christoph Standke
Tuple-Independent Representations of Infinite Probabilistic Databases

Nofar Carmeli, Nikolaos Tziavelis, Wolfgang Gatterbauer, Benny Kimelfeld and Mirek Riedewald
Tractable Orders for Direct Access to Ranked Answers of Conjunctive Queries

Paraschos Koutris, Xiating Ouyang and Jef Wijsen
Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Path Queries

Sourav Chakraborty, Kuldeep S. Meel and N.V. Vinodchandran
Estimating the Size of Unions of Sets in Streaming Models

Stanislav Kikot, Agi Kurucz, Vladimir Podolskii and Michael Zakharyaschev
Deciding Boundedness of Monadic Sirups

Xiao Hu
Cover or Pack: New Upper and Lower Bounds for Massively Parallel Joins

Xiao Hu, Paraschos Koutris and Spyros Blanas
Algorithms for a Topology-aware Massively Parallel Computation Model

Yanhao Wang, Michael Mathioudakis, Yuchen Li and Kian-Lee Tan
Minimum Coresets for Maxima Representation of Multidimensional Data

Yufei Tao and Yu Wang
New Algorithms for Monotone Classification