On Sunday 26 June 2016, the 35th edition of the annual ACM symposium on the theoretical foundations of data management, known as PODS, will kick off. PODS is held in its usual constellation, side-by-side with our friends and colleagues who do research on data management systems. Indeed, since 1991 already, PODS has been held jointly with the annual ACM SIGMOD international conference on data management systems in the renown spectacular event known as SIGMOD/PODS.

At this point I can mention only two special features of the upcoming PODS 2016:

• There is a special event to celebrate Ron Fagin, one of the founders of database theory, and still going strong as ever. Ron was educated in mathematical logic, and he had a big role in bringing the methods and techniques of mathematical logic, mostly the basic tools from the branch called model theory, into database theory. It goes both ways actually: a lot of database research contributes new results to model theory that are motivated by the data driven interests of data management research. Ron will give a talk himself at the new Gems of PODS session, designed to showcase to the wider SIGMOD community some of the many relevant results of database theory research.
  • For presentations see Gems of PODS page
• The keynote will be delivered by Moshe Y. Vardi, another icon of theoretical computer science who started his career in database theory. Moshe is also known in the wider computing community, as the provocative and transforming editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM. Moshe will talk about the great interplay between data management, logic (again), and automata theory, yielding powerful methods to optimize database queries. The field of automata theory is another one that has received a lot of inspiration from data management problems. We have seen a lot of exchange between database theory and automata theory researchers, with beautiful results. A great example is the work by Bojanczyk, David, Muscholl, Schwentick and Segoufin that will receive the 2016 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon PODS Test-of-Time Award at SIGMOD/PODS 2016.