Conference Planning
- 1) The conference will take place online in a way that accommodates different time zones. Every session will be repeated twice with a 12 hour difference. Presenters of papers will be asked to be present in at least one session and of course in both if this might be possible. We will collect upfront information on which presenters will be able to attend which session and this information will be available on the program so that participants know what to expect.
- 2) Every SIGMOD day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) will have content for 12 hours (including 4 hours of breaks). This 12 hour block will be repeated on the same day making for a full 24 hours. This way, people can join during any arbitrary slot and still follow a 12 hour consecutive program to participate for a whole SIGMOD day.
- 3) All paper talks will be pre-recorded and available online both before and after the conference.
- 4) Due to the increased efforts in review quality by our reviewers and associate editors, we managed to accept a record number of papers this year. For a total of 236 papers: 188 in the research track, 27 in the demo track, and 21 in the industry track.
- 5) Due to the increase in number of papers and in an effort to reduce the number of parallel sessions from 8 in recent years to 4, so that all papers get a lot of exposure and interaction, each presentation will get a 5 minute video slot+sufficient time for live Q&A. An additional longer video of 20 minutes will also be available directly through the program alongside the 5 minute video so that participants can easily watch it at will.
- 6) To increase interaction and to also help to focus on the most interesting part of the program for participants and presenters, we are introducing Curated Sessions. A curated session can be thought of as a mini workshop where all material on a specific topic is clustered together. Curated sessions have a duration of 3 hours and may contain research papers (from any track: data science & engineering, applications, data management), demo papers, industry papers, round table discussions, and invited mini-keynotes.
- 7) Curated sessions consist of 3 one hour blocks. In each one hour block with papers, we will fit at most 6 papers. The session will start by playing the 6 five minute videos followed by a 20 minute Q&A to promote interactivity where the authors of all papers will be invited to take and answer questions live (this also helps streamline Q&A in sessions where some authors cannot be present due to time zone conflicts).
- 8) Each session will have a chat forum associated with it. The chat will be live both before and after the session so that discussions can happen offline as well.
- 9) The authors of every paper will be able to also host “office hours”. That is, they can announce slots in a time zone that is comfortable for them and any participant will be able to attend to chat more about the paper. The OH link and time-slot details for each paper will be alongside the video links in the program of the conference.
- 10) Demo papers will be asked to host such office hours in specific plenary slots. This is so that participants can attend several demo OHs consecutively simulating a typical in-person demo room.
- 11) Tools: We will be using Zoom for all talks and sessions. In addition, we will be using Whova, an online platform which offers a holistic environment that makes it easy to attend online conferences, making it easy to navigate all information in the program, offering multiple features such as chat rooms, making it easy to add conference slots to a calendar and more. VLDB 2021 will also be using Whova. We plan to open Whova a few weeks before the conference with all or most material uploaded so that 1) participants can run test sessions and get familiar with the platform, and 2) participants can start browsing the material and even potentially start participating in session chat rooms.
