The Principles of Database Systems (PODS) symposium series, held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference series, provides a premier annual forum for the communication of new advances in the theoretical foundations of data management, traditional or non-traditional (see https://databasetheory.org/PODS).

** Topics of Interest **

For the 40th edition, PODS continues to aim to broaden its scope, and calls for research papers providing original, substantial contributions along one or more of the following tracks:

- deep theoretical exploration of topical areas central to data management
- new formal frameworks that aim at providing a basis for deeper theoretical investigation of important emerging issues in data management
- validation of theoretical approaches from the lens of practical applicability in data management. Papers in this track should provide an experimental evaluation that gives new insight in established theories. Besides, they should provide a clear message to the database theory community as to which aspects need further (theoretical) investigation, based on the experimental findings.

Topics that fit the interests of the symposium include, but are not limited to:

- concurrency & recovery, distributed/parallel databases, cloud computing
- data and knowledge integration and exchange, data provenance, views and data warehouses, - metadata management
- data-centric (business) process management, workflows, web services
- data management and machine learning
- data mining, information extraction, search
- data models, data structures, algorithms for data management
- data privacy and security, human-related data and ethics
- data streams
- design, semantics, query languages
- domain-specific databases (multi-media, scientific, spatial, temporal, text)
- graph databases and (semantic) Web data
- incompleteness, inconsistency, uncertainty in data management
- knowledge-enriched data management
- model theory, logics, algebras, computational complexity

** Submission Format **

Submitted papers must be formatted using the standard ACM proceedings stylesheet (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template) with the sigconf document class (\documentclass[sigconf]{acmart}). Submitted papers should be at most twelve pages, including bibliography. Additional details may be included in an appendix that should be incorporated at the submission time (online appendices are not allowed). However, such appendices will be read at the discretion of the program committee. Papers that are longer than twelve pages (including bibliography but excluding the appendix) or do not cohere with the ACM proceedings style risk rejection without consideration of their merits. PODS 2021 specifically encourages the submission of shorter papers as well as papers that make use of the full page allowance. The submission process will be through the Web at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pods2021. Note that PODS does not use double-blind reviewing, and therefore PODS submissions should have the names and affiliations of authors listed on the paper.
The results of a submitted paper must be unpublished and not submitted elsewhere, including the formal proceedings of other symposia or workshops. Authors of an accepted paper will be expected to sign copyright release forms, and one author is expected to present it at the conference. PODS supports the open-access of published research. It is therefore expected that authors of accepted papers will make the final version of their papers also freely accessible on arXiv by the camera-ready deadline.

** Important Dates **

FIRST SUBMISSION CYCLE:
July 02, 2020: Abstract submission
July 07, 2020: Paper submission
September 18, 2020: First notification
October 16, 2020: Revised submission
November 13, 2020: Final notification

SECOND SUBMISSION CYCLE:
December 13, 2020: Abstract submission
December 20, 2020: Paper submission
March 05, 2021: Notification

All deadlines end at 5 pm Pacific Time.

** Organization **

Chair
Reinhard Pichler (TU Wien, Austria)

Program Committee Members
Mahmoud Abo Khamis (Relational AI, USA)
Marcelo Arenas (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile)
Sepehr Assadi (Rutgers University, USA)
Marco Calautti (University of Trento, Italy)
Hubie Chen (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)
Edith Cohen (Google Research, USA and Tel Aviv University, Israel)
Claire David (LIGM, University Gustave Eiffel, France)
Alin Deutsch (University of California, San Diego, USA)
Diego Figueira (LaBRI, CNRS & Univ Bordeaux, France)
Martin Grohe (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Yazmin Angélica Ibáñez-García (Cardiff University, UK)
Batya Kenig (University of Washington, USA)
Daniel Kifer (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Jerzy Marcinkowski (University of Wrocław, Poland)
Frank Neven (Hasselt University, Belgium)
Matthias Niewerth (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
Rasmus Pagh (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Liat Peterfreund (CNRS, IRIF, Université de Paris, France)
Juan Reutter (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile)
Thomas Schwentick (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
Pierre Senellart (ENS, PSL University, France)
Srikanta Tirthapura (Apple Inc., and Iowa State University, USA)
Martín Ugarte (Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, Chile)

PODS General Chair
Leonid Libkin (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Proceedings Chair
Paolo Guagliardo (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Publicity Chair
Nofar Carmeli (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)

** Awards **

Best Paper Award: An award will be given to the best submission, as judged by the program committee.

Best Student Paper Award: There will also be an award for the best submission, as judged by the program committee, either written solely by students or where the major contribution was made by students. An author is considered as a student if, at the time of submission, she/he is enrolled in a program at a university or institution leading to a doctoral/master’s/bachelor’s degree.

The program committee reserves the right to give both awards to the same paper, not to give an award, or to split an award among several papers. Papers authored or co-authored by program committee members are not eligible for an award.