2021 SIGMOD Awards

The 2021 SIGMOD Awards Committee comprising of Stefano Ceri, Yanlei Diao, H V Jagadish, Volker Markl, Renée J. Miller and Sunita Sarawagi is happy to announce the following recipients of the 2021 ACM SIGMOD awards.

The 2021 ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award goes to Alon Halevy for his pioneering work on the foundations of data integration, Web-scale integration, and the intelligent use of structured data in Web search, with widespread practical impact.

The 2021 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award goes to Divesh Srivastava for outstanding professional service to the database community including SIGMOD and VLDB Endowment; mentoring of junior researchers; innovative community initiatives; and international outreach.

The 2021 ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award goes to “No free lunch in data privacy” by D Kifer, A Machanavajjhala, a foundational paper on data privacy, that has spawned much follow-up work, and belongs in the curriculum of any course on data privacy. It raises fundamental questions on how to define privacy, and the situations when differential private mechanisms provide meaningful semantic privacy guarantees. It led to the development of more practical, general privacy frameworks. Seminal ideas from the paper are being used to quantify the privacy ensured by the 2020 Decennial Census to each person in the US.

The 2021 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award goes to Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an early and influential demonstration of the power of data science to transform a scientific domain. Not only has this system shown off the value of data management technology, it has also influenced data management by publishing real analytic workloads that have been used for testing, comparing, and advancing data management systems.

The award recognizes the contributions of Michael Blanton, Adam Bolton, Bill Boroski, Joel Brownstein, Robert Brunner, Tamas Budavari, Sam Carliles, Jim Gray, Steve Kent, Peter Kunszt, Gerard Lemson, Nolan Li, Dmitry Medvedev, Jeff Munn, Deoyani Nandrekar-Heinis, Maria Nieto-Santisteban, Wil O’Mullane, Victor Paul, Don Slutz, Alex Szalay, and Gyula Szokoly.