PODS 2026 CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS
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 nontraditional (see https://databasetheory.org/PODS).
The 2026 conference will be held Bengaluru, India, on May 31 - June 05, 2026.
Mission
The PODS community has a pivotal position in the research of computer science. It aims to provide a solid scientific basis for methods, techniques, and solutions for the data management challenges that continually arise in our data-driven society. It develops new ways of advancing data management to reflect the rich landscape of data requirements in applications nowadays. Our goal is to develop solutions that ensure high levels of efficiency, scalability, usability, expressiveness, robustness, security, clarity, and privacy, among others. The PODS community is an open space where researchers from various areas related to the principles of computer science can discuss, interact, and propose solutions to problems in data management.
Scope
PODS seeks scientific articles that present principled contributions to modeling, application and system building in the context of data management. Such articles might be based, among others, on establishing theoretical results, developing new concepts and frameworks that deserve further exploration, providing experimental work that sheds light on the scientific foundations of the discipline, or a rigorous analysis of important industry artifacts. At a time when computer science is increasingly data-centric, it is essential to promote an active exchange of tools and techniques between PODS and other communities focused on data management. PODS thus pays special attention to those papers that help in the urgent process of integrating data management techniques within broader computer science.
Topics that fit the interests of the symposium include, but are not limited to:
- Database processing: Query evaluation, query optimization, schema management, distributed data processing, approximate data processing
- Database design: Data models, query languages, schemas, constraints
- Database access: Data structures, access methods, concurrency, transactions
- Data quality: Data cleaning, data discovery, data exploration
- Data analysis: Data mining, machine learning, information extraction, data streams
- Uncertainty: Incompleteness, inconsistency, ontological query answering, semi-structured data
- Interoperability: Mappings and views, data integration, data exchange, ontology-based data access
- Responsible data management: Access control, privacy, security, verification, ethical aspects of data management
- Connections between database principles and other disciplines
- Database processing: Query evaluation, query optimization, schema management, distributed data processing, approximate data processing
- Database design: Data models, query languages, schemas, constraints
- Database access: Data structures, access methods, concurrency, transactions
- Data quality: Data consistency, data cleaning, data discovery, data exploration
- Data analysis: Data mining, machine learning, information extraction, data streams
- Uncertainty: Incomplete data, inconsistent data, probabilistic data
- Interoperability: Mappings and views, data integration, data exchange, ontology-based data access
- Responsible data management: Access control, privacy, security, verification, ethical aspects of data management
- Human-database interaction: data summarization, data visualization, explanation for database queries
- Connections between database principles and other disciplines
Submission Site
https://www.easychair.org/my/conference?conf=pods2026
Submission Format
LaTex users must format their submission using the standard ACM "acmsmall" proceedings stylesheet: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
They must use the following class declaration:
\documentclass[acmsmall,review,anonymous]{acmart}A submission can be up to 15 pages, not including references, plus unlimited space for references. Additional details may be included in a clearly marked appendix, of unlimited length, that should be incorporated at submission time; online appendices are not allowed. However, an appendix will be read at the discretion of the program committee. Papers that are longer than 15 pages or do not cohere with the required format style risk rejection without consideration of their merits. 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 accepted papers will be published in a PODS 2026 issue of the PACMMOD () journal. Authors of papers published in the PACMMOD issues of PODS 2026 will be invited to present their work at the SIGMOD/PODS conference. PODS will apply a double-blind reviewing process. This implies that submitted papers must adhere to the double-blind reviewing policy described below and, in addition, authors must provide a list of potential conflicts of interest at the moment of submission.
Double-anonymous reviewing
PODS 2026 will use a lightweight double-anonymous reviewing process. This means that submissions must adhere to the following:
- Author names and institutions must be omitted.
- References to the authors’ own related work should be in the third person.
- Acknowledgements, grant numbers, and links to submitted papers in public repositories will not be allowed.
However, authors should feel free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their paper as they normally would. For instance, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web or give talks on their research ideas.
Important Dates
FIRST SUBMISSION CYCLE:
Abstract deadline: June 3, 2025
Full paper submission deadline: June 10, 2025
Rebuttal: July 29 - August 1, 2025
Initial notification: August 11, 2025
Revision submission: August 25, 2025
Final notification: September 1, 2025
SECOND SUBMISSION CYCLE:
Abstract deadline: December 3, 2025
Full paper submission deadline: December 10, 2025
Rebuttal: January 26 - 29, 2025
Initial notification: February 8, 2025
Revision submission: February 22, 2026
Final notification: March 1, 2026
All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE