Proceedings
PODS 2017 papers will be accessed here.
Conference Program: PODS Sessions
This page describes the complete PODS Conference program.
The PODS 2017 program will also be available at http://confer.csail.mit.edu/sigmod2017. Confer is a conference program management tool with a crowd-sourcing component that automatically groups papers into sessions to maximize the number of papers each attendee likes that he or she will get to see.
PODS Keynote Talk
Monday 8:15-9:40
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Jan Van den Bussche (Hasselt University)
- Data Citation: a Computational Challenge (pods313sd)
Susan Davidson (University of Pennsylvania)
Abstract: Most information is now published in complex, structured, evolving datasets or databases. As such, there is increasing demand that this digital information should be treated in the same way as conventional publications and cited appropriately. Unlike traditional publications, however, which have a fixed granularity to which citations can be attached (e.g. a paper in a conference proceedings, or chapter in a book), the granularity of data varies when retrieved by a query over a database. Since there are a potentially infinite number of queries, each accessing and generating different subsets of the database, it is impossible to explicitly attach a citation to every possible result set and/or query. Data citation is therefore a computational challenge, whose solution draws on two well-studied problems in database theory: query answering using views, and provenance. In this talk, I will give an overview of what is being done in data citation and highlight several open research problems, both practical and theoretical.
Bio: Susan B. Davidson received the B.A. degree in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1978, and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1980 and 1982. Dr. Davidson is the Weiss Professor of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has been since 1982, and currently serves as Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association. Dr. Davidson’s research interests include database and web-based systems, scientific data management, provenance, crowdsourcing, and data citation. Dr. Davidson was the founding co-director of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics from 1997-2003, and the founding co-director of the Greater Philadelphia Bioinformatics Alliance. She served as Deputy Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2005-2007 and Chair of CIS from 2008-2013. Her awards include: ACM Fellow, Corresponding Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2015), Lenore Rowe Williams Award (2002), Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a Hitachi Chair (2004), Trustees’ Council of Penn Women/Provost Award (April 2015) for her work on advancing women in engineering, and IEEE TCDE Impact Award (2017).
RESEARCH SESSIONS
Session 1: New formal frameworks
Monday 9:40-10:30
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Paris Koutris (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Session 2: Algorithms, data structures, benchmarking
Monday 11:00-12:40
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Floris Geerts (University of Antwerp)
- Benchmarking the chase (pods043)
Michael Benedikt (University of Oxford), George Konstantinidis (University of Oxford), Giansalvatore Mecca (University of Basilicata), Boris Motik (University of Oxford), Paolo Papotti (Arizona State University), Donatello Santoro (University of Basilicata) and Efthymia Tsamoura (University of Oxford)
- Efficient and Provable Multi-Query Optimization (pods040)
Tarun Kathuria (Microsoft Research) and S Sudarshan (Indian Institute of Technology)
- Write-Optimized Skip Lists (pods118)
Michael Bender (Stony Brook University), Martín Farach-Colton (Rutgers University), Rob Johnson (Stony Brook University), Simon Mauras (ENS Lyon), Tyler Mayer (Stony Brook University), Cynthia Phillips (Sandia National Laboratories) and Helen Xu (MIT)
- Output-optimal Parallel Algorithms for Similarity Joins (pods085)
Xiao Hu (HKUST), Yufei Tao (University of Queensland) and Ke Yi (HKUST)
Gems of PODS and Test-of-Time Award
Monday 14:00-15:30
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Floris Geerts (University of Antwerp)
- The Semiring Framework for Database Provenance (ToT Award)
(pods319vt)
Val Tannen (University of Pennsylvania)
Abstract: Imagine a computational process that uses a complex input consisting of multiple “items” (e.g., files, tables, tuples, parameters, configuration rules) The provenance analysis of such a process allows us to understand how the different input items affect the output of the computation. It can be used, for example, to derive confidence in the output (given confidences in the input items), to derive the minimum access clearance for the output (given input items with different classifications), to minimize the cost of obtaining the output (given a complex input item pricing scheme). It also applies to probabilistic reasoning about an output (given input item distributions), as well as to output maintenance, and to debugging.
Provenance analysis for queries, views, database ETL tools, and schema mappings is strongly influenced by their declarative nature, providing mathematically nice descriptions of the output-inputs correlation. In a series of papers starting with PODS 2007 we have developed an algebraic framework for describing such provenance based on commutative semirings and semimodules over such semirings. So far, the framework has exploited usefully the observation that, for database provenance, data use has two flavors: joint and alternative.
Here, we have selected several insights that we consider essential for the appreciation of this framework’s nature and effectiveness and we also give some idea of its applicability.
Bio: Val Tannen is a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science of the University of Pennsylvania. He joined Penn after receiving his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. After working for a time in Programming Languages, his current research interests are in Databases. Moreover, he has always been interested in applications of Logic to Computer Science and since 1994 he has also worked in Bioinformatics, leading a number of interdisciplinary projects. In Databases, he and his students and collaborators have worked on query language design and on models and systems for query optimization, parallel query processing, and data integration. More recently their work has focused on models and systems for data sharing, data provenance, the management of uncertain information and algorithmic provisioning for what-if analysis. Tannen has received the 20 year Test-of-Time Award from ICDT and the 10 year Test-of-Time Award from PODS. He is an ACM Fellow.
- Data Integration: After the Teenage Years (pods316ah)
Alon Halevy (Recruit Institute of Technology)
Abstract: Twenty five years ago, data integration was a concern mainly for large enterprises with many autonomous data sources. Since then, while data integration became even more important to enterprises, the technology has ventured out into new areas, such as the Web and recently into voice-activated consumer devices that answer a plethora of questions in your home. At the core of these systems is a mechanism for describing the semantics and capabilities of individual data sources. Database theory has made important contributions to the area of modeling data sources and query answering in data integration systems. I this talk I will cover some of the main developments in the field of data integration since the mid-90’s, and discuss the challenges that lie ahead.

Bio: Alon Halevy is the C.E.O of the Recruit Institute of Technology. From 2005 to 2015 he headed the Structured Data Management Research group at Google. Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he founded the Database Group. In 1999, Dr. Halevy co-founded Nimble Technology, one of the first companies in the Enterprise Information Integration space, and in 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic, a company that created search engines for the deep web, and was acquired by Google. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the author of the book “The Infinite Emotions of Coffee”, and co-author of the book “Principles of Data Integration”.
PODS Session 3: Concurrency, JSON, learning and privacy
Monday 16:00-18:05
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Stijn Vansummeren (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
PODS Session 4: Best paper award, ontologies and probabilistic databases
Tuesday 14:00-15:40
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Andreas Pieris (University of Edinburgh)
- Best paper award: Dichotomies in Ontology-Mediated Querying with the Guarded Fragment (pods074)
André Hernich (University of Liverpool), Carsten Lutz (University of Bremen), Fabio Papacchini (University of Liverpool) and Frank Wolter (University of Liverpool)
- The Complexity of Ontology-Based Data Access with OWL2QL and Bounded Treewidth Queries (pods039)
Meghyn Bienvenu (CNRS, University of Montpellier), Stanislav Kikot (Birkbeck University of London), Roman Kontchakov (Birkbeck University of London), Vladimir V. Podolskii (Steklov Mathematical Institute, National Research University Higher School of Economics), Vladislav Ryzhikov (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Michael Zakharyaschev (Birkbeck University of London)
- Conjunctive Queries on Probabilistic Graphs: Combined Complexity (pods131)
Antoine Amarilli (Télécom Paris Tech), Mikael Monet (Télécom Paris Tech) and Pierre Senellart (École normale supérieure PSL Research University, INRIA Paris)
- Circuit Treewidth, Sentential Decision, and Query Compilation (pods010)
Simone Bova (TU Wien) and Stefan Szeider (TU Wien)
PODS Session 5: Enumeration problems
Tuesday 16:00-18:05
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Ke Yi (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
PODS Session 6: Best student paper, streaming and sketches
Wednesday 14:00-15:40
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Yufei Tao (University of Queensland)
PODS Session 7: Dependencies, graphs and query evaluation
Wednesday 16:00-18:05
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Angela Bonifati (Université de Lyon)
POSTER SESSIONS
SIGMOD/PODS Poster & Demo Session 1
Tuesday 16:00-18:00
Location: ⚓Stevens Salon D
- All papers from PODS Research Sessions 3, 4 and 7
- All SIGMOD papers from Tuesday: SIGMOD Research Sessions 1-10
- SIGMOD demos
SIGMOD/PODS Poster & Demo Session 2
Wednesday 16:00-18:00
Location: ⚓Stevens Salon D
- All papers from PODS Research Sessions 1, 2, 5 and 6
- All SIGMOD papers from Wednesday: SIGMOD Research Sessions 11-20
- SIGMOD demos
TUTORIAL SESSIONS
Invited Tutorial 1
Tuesday 11:00-12:20
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Benny Kimelfeld (Technion)
Invited Tutorial 2
Wednesday 11:00-12:20
Location: ♛Continental A
Session Chair: Semih Salihoglu (University of Waterloo)
PODS Welcome Reception
Sunday 18:00-20:00
Location: International South
PODS Business Meeting
Monday 19:00-20:00
Location: ♛Continental A