Call for Nominations – 2016 ACM SIGMOD Innovations and Contributions Awards

The SIGMOD Awards Committee invites nominations for the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and the SIGMOD Contributions Award. The nomination deadline for all awards is March 13, 2016.

In 1992, ACM SIGMOD started the Annual SIGMOD Innovations Award and SIGMOD Contributions Award as part of its Awards Program. In 2004, SIGMOD, with the unanimous approval of ACM Council, renamed the Innovations Award in honor of Dr. Edgar F. (Ted) Codd (1923 – 2003), who invented the relational data model and was responsible for the significant development of the database field as a scientific discipline.

SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award

The SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award is for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases. Previous winners of the Innovations Award are:  Michael Stonebraker (1992), James Gray (1993), Philip Bernstein (1994), David DeWitt (1995), C. Mohan (1996), David Maier (1997), Serge Abiteboul (1998), Hector Garcia-Molina (1999), Rakesh Agrawal (2000), Rudolf Bayer (2001), Patricia Selinger (2002), Donald Chamberlin (2003), Ronald Fagin (2004), Michael Carey (2005), Jeffrey Ullman (2006), Jennifer Widom (2007), Moshe Vardi (2008), Masaru Kitsuregawa (2009), Umeshwar Dayal (2010),  Surajit Chaudhuri (2011), Bruce Lindasy (2012), Stefano Ceri (2013), Martin Kersten (2014), and Laura Haas (2015).

SIGMOD Contributions Award

The SIGMOD Contributions Award is for outstanding and sustained services to the database field through education, conference organizations, journals, standards activities, research funding, etc. Previous winners of the Contributions Award are: Maria Zemankova (1992), Gio Wiederhold (1993), Yahiko Kambayashi (1995), Jeffrey Ullman (1996), Avi Silberschatz (1997), Won Kim (1998), Raghu Ramakrishnan (1999), Laura Haas and Michael Carey (2000), Daniel Rosenkrantz (2001), Richard Snodgrass (2002), Michael Ley (2003), Surajit Chaudhuri (2004), Hongjun Lu (2005), Tamer Ozsu (2006), Hans-Joerg Schek (2007), Klaus Dittrich (2008), Beng Chin Ooi (2009), David Lomet (2010), Gerhard Weikum (2011), Marianne Winslett (2012), H.V. Jagadish (2013), Kyu-Young Whang (2014), and Curtis Dyreson (2015).

Test-of-time Award

There is no formal nomination process for this award, but we highly appreciate input from the database community. The SIGMOD Awards Committee is charged with selecting the paper from the SIGMOD Proceedings from 10 years ago (i.e., from SIGMOD 2006) that has best met the “test of time,” that is, it has had the most influence since its publication. We are especially interested in first-hand accounts of ways in which the ideas of a paper have been used. Please look at the 2006 SIGMOD Publications, and if you have any information you believe would be of use to the committee, then please send the committee a note to the address given below.

Award Details and Nomination Process

Each award is given annually (if there is at least one qualified candidate) and consists of a plaque per person plus an honorarium ($10000 for the Codd Innovation Award, and $1000 for the Contributions Award). If the award is given to more than one individual, the honorarium will be split among all the recipients. The recipients will receive the awards at the annual ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference, at the awards session.

Eligibility: anyone except the current elected officers of SIGMOD (Chair, Vice Chair, and Treasurer), and members of the SIGMOD Awards Committee. Awards should be for contributions not already honored by a major ACM Award (e.g., the Turing Award, SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, or SIGMOD Contributions Award).

Nomination: Anyone in the field can nominate one or more persons or groups (self nominations are excluded).  Nominations should include a proposed citation (up to 25 words), a succinct (100-250 words) description of the innovation/contribution, and a detailed statement to justify the nomination; plain text is preferred. Along with the nomination, at least three additional supporting letters should be submitted. Such letters, however, should not be simple endorsements of the nomination, but convey additional factual information. The Awards Committee will evaluate all nominations and decide on zero or more winners. Nominations must be received by March 13, 2016 to be considered for this year’s award. Nominations should be sent to the address given below. The committee will automatically re-consider nominations for both awards from the past two years (2014 and 2015). Nominators are of course free to revise the supporting documents for such candidates.

Where to Send Nominations

Nominations should be submitted via e-mail to the SIGMOD 2016 Awards Committee Chair at lenzerini@dis.uniroma1.it.

SIGMOD 2016 Awards Committee

Elisa Bertino, Purdue University
Surajit Chaudhuri, Microsoft Research
Martin Kersten, CWI
Maurizio Lenzerini, Sapienza Universita di Roma  (Chair)
Jennifer Widom, Stanford University