SIGMOD 2026: Panel Discussions
P1: From Queries to Qubits: Data Management Meets Quantum Computing
Over the past several years, quantum computing has turned from a purely theoretical concept into a technology that is widely available via cloud offerings from multiple providers. Several manufacturers are now producing noisy intermediate-scale quantum hardware whose capabilities are growing at a fast pace. These developments have inspired a growing number of publications in the database community, as well as the creation of several workshops dedicated to exploring topics at the intersection of data management and quantum computing. This panel brings together experts from the quantum computing and data management communities, working in industry and academia, to discuss challenges and opportunities in this emerging research field.
Panel organizer and moderator:
Immanuel Trummer, Cornell University
Panelists:
Floris Geerts (Professor, University of Antwerp)
Rihan Hai (Assistant Professor, TU Delft)
Manish Kesarwani (Advisory Research Scientist, IBM Research)
Wolfgang Mauerer (Professor, Technical University of Applied Sciences Regensburg)
Krishnakumar Sabapathy (Head of Research in Quantum, Fujitsu, India)
Ibrahim Sabek (Assistant Professor, University of Southern California)
Kurt Stockinger (Professor, Zurich University of Applied Sciences and University of Zurich)
P2: Building Practical Secure Databases: Challenges and Opportunities
The need to securely manage sensitive data has led to significant advances in techniques such as encrypted query processing, fine-grained access control, and computation within trusted execution environments. However, integrating these techniques into practical database systems remains challenging due to performance overheads, complex threat models, and system design trade-offs. This panel brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the challenges and opportunities in building practical secure databases, with the goal of identifying promising directions for secure, efficient, and deployable data management systems.
Panel organizer and moderator:
Sujaya Maiyya, University of Waterloo
Panelists:
Ioannis Demertzis, Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Amr El Abbadi, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Norman May, Database Architect, SAP
Sharad Mehrotra, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine
P3: Sustaining Data Management Research in the GenAI Era
The rise of generative AI has fundamentally reshaped the research landscape in which our community operates. While data management has played a central role in enabling recent advances in machine learning, the GenAI era brings both new technical opportunities — in vector indexing, trustworthy and auditable AI, and scalable data infrastructure — and serious structural challenges. Funding agencies increasingly expect research portfolios to align with AI priorities, with the US emphasizing a "capability-first" agenda and the EU pursuing a "safety-first" approach anchored in the AI Act. At the same time, industry has become a gatekeeper of frontier models, proprietary data, and massive compute, shifting academia's traditional role from knowledge creator toward evaluator and adapter. This panel brings together representatives from funding agencies, industry, and senior researchers from across the globe to discuss how the data management community can articulate its value to funders, navigate constrained government budgets, engage productively with industry, identify the breakthroughs that will define our role in the AI revolution, and rethink curricula to prepare the next generation of data architects.
Panel organizer and moderator:
Sharad Mehrotra, UC Irvine and K. Selçuk Candan, Arizona State University
Panelists:
Rajeev Rastogi (Vice President, Amazon)
Rajesh Gupta (Dean, SCIDS, UCSD)
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman (CEO, Anusandhan National
Research Foundation)
Sylvia Spengler (Program Director, NSF IIS/CISE)
Anastasia Ailamaki (Professor, EPFL)