Proceedings of the on SIGMOD/PODS 2012 PhD Symposium

Welcome to the SIGMOD/PODS 2012 PhD Symposium, which is co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2012 and takes place on Sunday, May 20th, 2012. This is a forum where PhD students have an opportunity of presenting their research ideas, receiving feedback from and interacting with senior members of the community. The focus of the Symposium this year is on mentorship and providing constructive feedback to the students. Many members of the Program Committee attend the Symposium, providing ample opportunity for discussions and feedback. Each student whose submission is accepted for presentation is paired with a member of the PC for mentorship and one-on-one discussions. This year we received 20 papers in response to call for papers. Each of these was reviewed by three members of the PC with a focus on selecting submissions that were ready and could benefit from feedback. In the end, we selected twelve submissions for discussions at the Symposium. The proceedings include short descriptions of these PhD theses.