VLDB Scalable Data Science Category: The Inaugural Year

As part of the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2021 / Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Volume 14, a new Research Track category named Scalable Data Science (SDS) was launched [2, 6]. The goal of SDS is to attract cutting-edge and impactful real-world work in the scalable data science arena to enhance the impact and visibility of the VLDB community on data science practice, spur new technical connections, and inspire new follow-on research. The inaugural year proved to be successful, with numerous interesting papers from a wide cross section of both industry and academia, spanning several data science topics, and originating from several countries around the world.

In this report, we reflect on the inaugural year of SDS with some statistics on both submissions and accepted papers, SDS invited talks, and our observations, lessons, and tips as inaugural Associate Editors for SDS. We hope this article is helpful to future authors, reviewers, and organizers of SDS, as well as other interested members of the wider database / data management community and beyond.