ACM SIGMOD is pleased to present the 2013 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award to Sudipto Das. ACM SIGMOD is also pleased to recognize Herodotos Herodotou and Wenchao Zhou for Honorable Mention for the 2013 SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Visit the SIGMOD Blog (wp.sigmod.org) to read Kristina Lerman's blog on "Stop publishing so much already!"

The ACM recognizes distinguished scientists in the SIGMOD community that have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field. Congratulations to the 2013 awardees! Kasim Selcuk Candan, Kimberly Keeton, Antony (Tony) L Hosking, and Torben Bach Pedersen

The ACM has awarded senior membership to several people in the SIGMOD community from 2006 through 2012. Senior members have at least ten years of professional experience and have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers.

Visit the SIGMOD Blog (wp.sigmod.org) to read Prof. Gerhard Weikum's blog on "Where’s the Data in the Big Data Wave?" Prof. Weikum writes that "Big Data should be Interesting Data! There are various definitions of Big Data; most center around a number of V’s like volume, velocity, variety, veracity – in short: interesting data (interesting in at least one aspect). However, when you look into research papers on Big Data, in SIGMOD, VLDB, or ICDE, the data that you see here in experimental studies is utterly boring. Performance and scalability experiments are often based on the TPC-H benchmark: completely synthetic data with a synthetic workload that has been beaten to death for the last twenty years. Data quality, data cleaning, and data integration studies are often based on bibliographic data from DBLP, usually old versions with less than a million publications, prolific authors, and curated records. I doubt that this is a real challenge for tasks like entity linkage or data cleaning. So where’s the – interesting – data in Big Data research?"

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