42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) Montréal, Canada - May 4-8, 2026

ICDE Research Track Awards

Best Research Paper Runners Up

Best Research Paper

Award Committee:

Industry and Applications Best Paper

Award Committee:

Best Demonstration Paper

Award Committee:

IEEE ICDE 10-Year Influential Paper Award

Interactive Data Exploration with Smart Drill-Down
ICDE 2016 · IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering
Manas Joglekar, Hector Garcia-Molina, Aditya Parameswaran

Award Citation.
Smart drill-down introduced an automated data exploration operator that unified summarization with the surfacing of unexpected structure in a single interactive primitive. Its key ideas — customizable and interpretable notions of interestingness and coverage, point-and-click drill-downs, and adaptive sampling that keeps interactions responsive at scale — anticipated the design of modern augmented-analytics systems and influenced, over a decade, work on ML model debugging, fairness auditing, visualization recommendation, and query result explanation.

In essence, the paper asked how an analyst with bounded attention could efficiently surface what is interesting in a dataset too large to examine exhaustively. A decade later, the same shape of question — bounded human, vast space, the need to find what matters, now with LLM reasoning to help guide and prune the search — remains highly relevant to LLM-powered and agentic data analytics.

The connection to modern AI is also reflected in the authors' career trajectories: Parameswaran works at the frontier of LLM-powered data systems, and Joglekar works on LLMs themselves at OpenAI. The third coauthor, Hector Garcia-Molina, who passed away in late 2019, was a pioneer in building intelligence into data systems over decades and planted the seeds of this work. That this paper's central question has stayed important to data analysis a decade later, across both classical and AI-augmented systems, is precisely what the test of time is meant to recognize.

The subsequent trajectories of the surviving authors, guided by the late Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina, are the strongest possible evidence that this paper's question — not merely its answer — stood the test of time.

Sang Kyun Cha
Chair, Ten-Year Influential Paper Award Committee
IEEE ICDE 2026

TCDE Awards

IEEE TCDE Ramez Elmasri Outstanding Database Education Award

Andy Pavlo, CMU
For contributions to online database education through widely adopted courses, accessible instructional platforms, and open educational resources.

IEEE TCDE Impact Award

Sharad Mehrotra, University of California at Irvine
For foundational contributions to cloud data management and multimedia indexing and information retrieval.

Award Committee:

PC Awards and Recognition

ICDE Distinguished PC Members

ICDE Distinguished Area Chairs