SIGMOD 2025 – New Researcher Symposium
Crafting a Research Identity as a New Data Management Researcher in an AI-dominated Landscape
- Time slot and date: June 24, Lunch (13:00 - 14:30), Session (14:30 - 16:00)
- Location: Lunch (TBD), Session (Charlottenburg III), Intercontinental Berlin, Germany
- Session Co-Chairs: Karima Echihabi, Remy Wang & Madelon Hulsebos
 |
 |
 |
| Karima Echihabi Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco |
Remy Wang University of California – Los Angeles, USA |
Madelon Hulsebos CWI, Netherlands |
Abstract:
Every year, the SIGMOD Conference includes a symposium with advice on starting a career in data management. These symposia are informative and entertaining, geared towards graduate students, junior faculty, and junior industrial researchers but often attract a broader audience.
This year's SIGMOD New Researcher Symposium is on "Crafting a Research Identity as a New Data Management Researcher in an AI-dominated Landscape". Our panelists will share their diverse viewpoints and perspectives on this timely topic.
The session will begin with 5-min lightning talks where panelists present their view on how to craft a research identity as a new data management researcher, followed by a moderated Q&A session, then an open forum for the audience to ask questions. The session will be preceded by an informal lunch gathering of participants and panelists.
Attendance is free but registration is mandatory.
Panelists:
 Carsten Binnig TU Darmstadt, Germany |
Carsten Binnig is a Full Professor in the Computer Science department at TU Darmstadt and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at Brown University. Carsten received his PhD at the University of Heidelberg in 2008. Afterwards, he spent time as a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Group at ETH Zurich and at SAP working on in-memory databases. Currently, his research focus is on the design of scalable data management systems, databases and modern hardware as well as machine learning for scalable systems. His work has been awarded with a Google Faculty Award, as well as multiple best paper and best demo awards for his research. |
 Dan Suciu University of Washington, USA |
Dan Suciu is a Microsoft Endowed Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Suciu is conducting research in data management, on topics such as query optimization, probabilistic data, data pricing, parallel data processing, data security. He is a co-author of two books Data on the Web: from Relations to Semistructured Data and XML, 1999, and Probabilistic Databases, 2011. He received the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award, received several best paper awards and test of time awards, and is a Fellow of the ACM, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Suciu is currently an associate editor for the Journal of the ACM. Suciu's PhD students Gerome Miklau, Christopher Re and Paris Koutris received the ACM SIGMOD Best Dissertation Award in 2006, 2010, and 2016 respectively; Nilesh Dalvi and Remy Wang were runner ups in 2008 and 2024 respectively. |
 Alexander Ulrich Oracle Labs, USA |
Alexander Ulrich joined Oracle Labs in 2017 as a researcher specializing in database systems. He earned his PhD from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. His research focuses on bridging the gap between database systems, programming languages, and application development. At Oracle Labs, Alexander leads efforts to transform database management systems into highly efficient platforms for modern cloud applications. |
 Huanchen Zhang Tsinghua University, China |
Huanchen Zhang received the BS degree in computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2013, and the PhD degree in computer science from the Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2020. He is an assistant professor in the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University. His research interests include database management systems, indexing/filtering data structures, data compression, and cloud databases. |
 Paolo Papotti EURECOM, France |
Paolo Papotti got his Ph.D. degree from the University of Roma Tre (Italy) in 2007 and is an associate professor in the Data Science department at EURECOM (France) since 2017. Before joining EURECOM, he has been a scientist in the data analytics group at QCRI (Qatar) and an assistant professor at Arizona State University (USA). His research is in the broad areas of scalable data management and NLP, with a focus on data integration and information quality. |
| Renée J. Miller The University of Waterloo, Canada |
Renée J. Miller is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Intelligence at the University of Waterloo. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Canada’s National Academy of Science, Engineering and the Humanities. She received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), an NSF CAREER Award, the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award, an IBM Faculty Award, and the CS Canada Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science. She formerly held the Bell Canada Chair of Information Systems at the University of Toronto and a University Distinguished Professorship at Northeastern University. She is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS. Her work has focused on the long-standing open problem of data integration and has achieved the goal of building practical data integration systems. She and her colleagues received the ICDT Test-of-Time Award and the 2020 Alonzo Church Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation for their influential work establishing the foundations of data exchange. Professor Miller was an Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal and former president of the non-profit Very Large Data Base (VLDB) Foundation. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Cognitive Science from MIT. |
 Sihem Amer Yahya CNRS/University of Grenoble, France |
Sihem AMER YAHIA a 2020 CNRS Silver Medal Research Director at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. Throughout her career, she has been focusing on building data-intensive systems that care. She has worked on crafting a new research identity that cross topical boundaries in industry (at&t and Yahoo! labs) and in academia (QCRI and CNRS), in different countries, and as an Algerian Berber woman. She shares some of her experiences in an upcoming SIGMOD Record article on advice to mid-career researchers. |
Previous Symposia:
