PODS 2026: Call for Research Papers

The Principles of Database Systems (PODS) symposium series will be held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference series. PODS provides a premier annual forum for new advances in the theoretical foundations of data management.

The 2026 conference will be held in Bengaluru, India, on May 31 - June 05, 2026.

Mission

The PODS community aims to provide a solid scientific basis for data management methods, techniques, and solutions, and develops new ways of advancing data management.

Scope

PODS seeks scientific articles that present principled contributions to modeling, application and system building in the context of data management.

Topics of interest 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
• Human-database interaction: data summarization, data visualization, explanation for database queries

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.

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The results of a submitted paper must be unpublished and not submitted elsewhere.

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 will be invited to present their work at the SIGMOD/PODS conference.

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.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE

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, 2026
• Initial notification: February 8, 2026
• Revision submission: February 22, 2026
• Final notification: March 1, 2026