Panels at SIGMOD
Where Does Academic Database Research Go From Here?
- Dan Suciu, Microsoft Endowed Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington
- Sihem Amer-Yahia, Research Director, CNRS, LIG; Vice President of VLDB Endowment
- Yannis Ioannidis, Professor of Informatics & Telecom at the University of Athens, President of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Anastasia Ailamaki, Professor of Computer and Communication Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
- Ippokratis Pandis, VP/Distinguished Engineer at AWS
- Jens Dittrich, Professor of Computer Science at Saarland University; 3x CIDR gong show winner
(organized by Eugene Wu, Raul Castro Fernandez)
AI for Future Databases: A New Beginning or a Boulevard of Broken Dreams?
AI has opened new directions in database research, from learned components replacing traditional internals to LLMs, enabling a new generation of database systems that allow querying data beyond tables. Yet, adoption in commercial databases has been incremental rather than a fundamental rethinking of modern data system stacks. In this panel, we thus bring together experts from academia and industry to discuss the tension between potential and reality in how AI shapes real-world database products. We will explore questions such as: What should an AI-ready database stack look like—incremental evolution or radical departure? What prevents AI from replacing traditional components like query optimizers, cost models, and indexes? What does it take for LLM-based innovations to move beyond impressive demos? Can we use LLMs for more than Text-to-SQL and LLM-UDFs? By tackling these questions, this panel will challenge assumptions in research, examine AI’s role in future databases, and ask: Is AI the key to overcoming core limitations and will thus enable a new generation of database systems, or maybe AI is just another boulevard of broken (database) dreams?
- Anastasia Ailamaki (EPFL)
- Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft)
- Tim Kraska (MIT & Amazon Web Services)
- Feifei Li (Alibaba Cloud)
- Aditya Parameswaran (UC Berkeley)
- Immanuel Trummer (Cornell University)
(organized by Danica Porobic, Carsten Binning)
