PhD in Databases
introduction
• why PhD in databases?
– everyone should have a reason!
• which topic should I choose?
– usually the supervisor does it for you, when you’re young
– when you grow up, you get to choose the things you get involved
with
• what are the requirements? how long does it take?
– typically, in NTUA it takes at least 3 years and a refereed
international journal publication is required
– in reality, they are more strict and are set by your supervisor
• what is a good PhD?
– it should cover in detail an interesting research area and offer
novel technical insight
– as a result, a PhD student should have a good publication record
example publication venues
• conferences
– Very Large Databases (VLDB)
• journals
– ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
• workshops
– International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB)
• national events
– Hellenic Data Management Symposium (HDMS)
• other? symposia
conferences
• a conference attracts the most recent, state-of-the-art, work
on a broad range of topics
– (usually) annual event, organized around the world
– highly competitive, great visibility/impact
• submission process
– first an abstract is submitted
– a week later the full version is due
• 12 double column pages, strict formatting
– around 2 months later the decisions are announced
• review process
– three referees summarize the contributions and give marks on
relevance, novelty, presentation, impact, technical depth, overall
recommendation
• scores: reject, weak reject, neutral, weak accept, accept, strong accept
– discussion phase among referees, before final decision
conferences
types of papers
• full paper
– requires presentation: 25 mins + 5 mins questions
• short paper / poster paper
– a reduced printed version of the paper, e.g., 6 pages
– shorter (20 mins) or no presentation
• demo paper
– describe a system implementation
– a demonstration and poster is required in special session
• all papers appear in the proceedings of the conference
– published by major publishers (ACM, IEEE press, Springer)
conferences
some terms
• Call for Papers (CFP) contains all information, defines topics
• Important Dates specify the submission deadlines and event
dates
• Organizing Committee: people responsible for the local
arrangements
• Program Committee (PC): people that do the review process
• Organizing / PC Chair: person in charge
• Acceptance Rate: the ratio of accepted vs. submitted papers
– not always representative of the quality of the venue
• Tracks/Areas: target group separation
– research vs. industrial track
– separate committees
• Sessions: accepted papers are thematically organized into
parallel sessions
conference ranking
• a very old (partially subjective) list (from NUS 1999)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~guofei/CS_ConfRank.htm#db
AREA: Data Bases
Rank 1:
SIGMOD: ACM SIGMOD Conf on Management of Data
PODS: ACM SIGMOD Conf on Principles of DB Systems
VLDB: Very Large Data Bases
ICDE: Intl Conf on Data Engineering
ICDT: Intl Conf on Database Theory
Rank 2:
SSD: Intl Symp on Large Spatial Databases
DEXA: Database and Expert System Applications
FODO: Intl Conf on Foundation on Data Organization
EDBT: Extending DB Technology
DOOD: Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases
DASFAA: Database Systems for Advanced Applications
CIKM: Intl. Conf on Information and Knowledge Management
SSDBM: Intl Conf on Scientific and Statistical DB Mgmt
CoopIS - Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
ER - Intl Conf on Conceptual Modeling (ER)
Rank 3: …
workshops
• like conferences, but with a more focused subject
– they are organized in parallel with a conference
– some have unofficial proceedings, other full published proceedings
• how to recognize good workshops?
– long-running, well-established
– the good ones are always in collaboration with good conferences
• what should go in a workshop?
– dblab diploma theses are excellent candidates
• somewhat limited impact
– however, some very good papers have appeared in workshops
journals
• what are the differences with conferences?
– no call (except for special issues) --- send anytime
– longer, more detailed reviewing phase --- can take a year
• revisions, answer letters
– longer page limits
– often high acceptance rates
– only a few good but a lot of bad journals
• which paper should you send there?
– extended version of conference papers, with only 30% new material
– not previously accepted papers are also good candidates
• why bother with journals?
– in all scientific disciplines, except in CS, journals are more
important/prestigious than conferences
– people not familiar with CS and DB usually judge a CV by #journals
journal ranking
a rather subjective list
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•
•
•
•
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ACM Transaction on Database Systems (TODS)
VLDB Journal (VLDBJ)
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
Elsevier Information Systems
Elsevier Data and Knowledge Engineering (DKE)
…
reading papers
• is it important?
– yes! sometimes, more important than reading text books
• what do I read?
– read recent bibliography on your topic
– find a good survey paper
– read good papers, even if they are not directly related to your
topic
• where do I find them?
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–
–
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look for them in the most recent and relevant good conferences
ask your supervisor!
search the web
get them from DBLP, google (scholar), etc.
writing papers
• what goes in a paper?
– research paper: it presents an interesting solution to an interesting
problem
– survey paper: reviews all relevant literature for an interesting
topic
• structure of a paper
– abstract, (1) introduction, (2) related work, (3) problem statement,
(4) solution, (5) experiments, (6) conclusion, references
• a lot of advice available on the web
– http://people.csail.mit.edu/mernst/advice/write-technicalpaper.html
– http://www.cs.uoi.gr/~pvassil/linx/localCopies4grads/Survey_guidel
ines_byPV.pdf
submitting papers
• choose carefully the right venue
– based on the topic
– based on the quality of your work
• be objective, compare your work with others
– your supervisor knows better
• how to handle rejection
– don’t despair!
– reviews can be noisy/unfair, resubmit…
– if you get consistently bad reviews  you should lower your
expectations
– consider journals, where you can answer the reviewers’ comments
• how to handle acception
– don’t cheer!
– reviews can be noisy/unfair, you’re lucky
– consider creating an extended version and submit it to a journal
web sources
• DBLP (computer science archive)
– http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/
• DBWorld (db announcements mailing list)
– http://www.cs.wisc.edu/dbworld/
• citeseer (digital library)
– http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
• Google Scholar (search engine for papers)
– http://scholar.google.com