Message from the ICDE 2012 Program Chairs and the General Chair

Since 1984, ICDE has established itself as a premier forum in the area of data management, providing a unique opportunity for database researchers, users, practitioners, and developers to exchange new ideas. The 28th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering takes place in the city of Washington, United States, from April 1 to 5, 2012. We are proud to present its program in these proceedings. Each of the main days of the conference starts out with a keynote by a distinguished scientist: Serge Abiteboul from INRIA in France on April 2; Surajit Chaudhuri from Microsoft Research in the United States on April 3; and Peter Druschel from the Max- Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany on April 4. We thank all the authors who submitted their work to ICDE for making the conference happen. We received 413 paper submissions for the research track, 22 submissions for the industrial track, and 68 demo proposals. The program committee was organized into fifteen topic-based tracks. Each track was headed by a vice-chair who formed a committee to evaluate the papers assigned to that track. This resulted in a research program committee consisting of 188 members for the research tracks, 12 members for the industrial track, and 30 members for the demo track. The evaluation process consisted of three distinct phases: initial reviews of the papers by PC members, some initial discussions, author responses to these reviews, and then further discussion by the PC and fine-tuning of the reviews. The research program features 100 papers, the industrial program 9 papers, and the demonstration program 28 demos. The conference program also includes 6 seminar tutorials and one panel. As a feature of ICDE conferences in recent years, all papers are presented at a poster session. Accompanying the main conference are seven workshops.