SIGMOD 2018 Program Committee Chair’s Report

This paper reports on the program committee process for SIGMOD 2018, including statistics, trends, and changes from previous years. Some highlights are:

• Submissions to SIGMOD 2018 were down 6% from 2017. The acceptance rate of research papers was 20%, which is in line with recent years.
• Reviewers showed a strong bias to reject borderline papers rather than giving authors the opportunity to revise. By being biased in the second round in favor of offering authors the opportunity to submit a revision, we increased the acceptance rate signifi­cantly from the first to second round. We strongly recommend that future PC chairs adopt this bias.
• To help ensure high quality reviews, we gave PC members a light reviewing load and ensured that 95% of review assignments went to PC members who bid Eager or Willing to review the paper. Nevertheless, approximately 20-25% of reviews are unaccepta­bly shallow. We need to do better.
• The main changes in 2018 were (i) to reduce the number of parallel sessions, (ii) include tutorials during the main conference (Tuesday – Thursday), and (iii) return to clustering industry presentations into separate industry sessions rather than grouping them with research papers on the same topic. To enable (i) and (ii), we shortened the standard presentation time to 20 minutes and offered only 10 minutes to 40% of the papers. Anecdotal evidence is that attendees were happy with these changes.

The paper closes with comments about my previous experiences as PC chair for SIGMOD 1979 and VLDB 2002 and with the evolution of PC processes.