ACM SIGMOD City, Country, Year
sigmod pods logo

SIGMOD Program

PODS Program

Calls For Submissions





Diversity and Inclusion in Database Conference Venues

The Data Management community is committed to the promotion of diversity and inclusion in all aspects of our professional activities. We celebrate the diversity in our community and welcome everyone regardless of age, gender identity, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, country of origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, and work experience. We also welcome people and opinions of all political persuasions, as long as they abide by the ACM policy against harassment. Our initiative coordinates D&I efforts across the data management community and includes this year’s D&I chairs of SIGMOD, VLDB, SoCC, and ICDE.

For more information, please refer to https://dbdni.github.io/

Please follow this webpage for updates on the steps we are taking to enhance the inclusivity and diversity of our conference and community. As we pursue more initiatives, we may have some missteps. We value your feedback and ideas to help us all build a healthier and more welcoming community.

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, or complaints, please email the SIGMOD Diversity and Inclusion Chairs: Avrilia Floratou (avflor@microsoft.com) and Arun Kumar (arunkk@eng.ucsd.edu).

INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY IN WRITING

As a large scientific and technical community that has a direct impact on many people from different backgrounds around the world, Diversity and Inclusion are crucial for the data management community. ACM explains these goals as follows. Diversity is achieved when the individuals around the table are drawn from a variety of backgrounds and experience, leading to a breadth of viewpoints, reasoning, and approaches (also referred to as "the who"). Inclusion is achieved when the environment is characterized by behaviors that welcome and embrace diversity ("the how"). Both are important in our writing and other forms of communication such as posters and talks.

Inclusion

Be mindful of not using language or examples that further the marginalization, stereotyping, or erasure of any group of people, especially historically marginalized and/or under-represented groups (URGs) in computing. Of course, exclusionary or indifferent treatment can arise unintentionally. Be vigilant and actively guard against such issues in your writing. Reviewers will also be empowered to monitor and demand changes if such issues arise in your submissions. Here are some examples of such issues for your benefit:

Examples of exclusionary and other non-inclusive writing to consider avoiding:

Diversity

Going further, please also consider actively raising the representation of URGs in your writing. Diversity of representation helps create an environment and community culture that could ultimately make our field more welcoming and attractive to people from URGs. This is a small but crucial step you can take towards celebrating and improving our community’s diversity.

Examples of infusing diversity into writing to consider adopting:

Responsibility

Finally, if your work involves data-driven techniques that make decisions about people, please consider explicitly discussing whether it may lead to disparate impact on different groups, especially URGs. Consider discussing the ethical and societal implications. For example, see this article discussing the potential for disparate impact of facial recognition in healthcare and strategies to avoid or reduce harm. This SIGMOD Blog article also gives a comprehensive overview of various dimensions and approaches for responsible application of data management ideas. We hope our community can help permeate this culture of responsibility and awareness about potentially harmful unintended negative consequences of our work within the larger computing landscape.

Acknowledgments and Further Reading:

Tips for Creating Inclusive Talks and Videos

We now explain some additional tips on inclusive practices when creating slide content for talks, as well as during speaking and recording videos.

1) Slide content:

It helps improve readability if your font sizes are not too small and if you avoid packing too much content onto one slide. If possible, avoid embedding text into images if similarly effective alternatives exist for rendering your content. Images in slides are usually unreadable for screen readers, which are often used by people with visual impairments.

2) During speaking/recording videos:

It helps improve legibility if you pause for a moment in between sections and also during slide transitions. If possible, avoid speaking too fast, since that can make comprehension harder for many non-native English speakers, as well as people with hearing impairments. If you plan to record your face while speaking, look directly at the camera while speaking so that lipreading is more feasible for people with hearing impairments.

3) Transcripts and captioning:

SIGMOD’21 invites everyone contributing recorded talk videos to contribute plaintext transcripts of their talk and also embed time-aligned captions/subtitles in their videos. Both of these are optional but highly encouraged. Captions are widely known to be helpful in enabling better comprehension for people with auditory impairments and non-native English speakers. [1] Captions also help many people who find different accents more difficult to comprehend.

To create a plaintext transcript, you could write down what you speak ab initio. Alternatively, you could use a (free) automatic speech recognition (ASR) service to convert your recorded audio to an intermediate text file that you can then edit to correct ASR errors.

To create closed captioning for video, here is a suggested and hopefully easy-to-execute workflow based on Youtube’s capabilities [2]:

References:

Credits
Follow our progress: FacebookTwitter