Call for IEEE ICDE 2026 Data Engineering Future Technologies (DEFT) Track

We solicit position papers for a special track at the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2026). The field of databases is rapidly growing simultaneously in several ways. New systems with new capabilities and new approaches to data management are being constantly developed. Database technologies and ideas are finding their way into new applications. The field of data science, of which data curation, wrangling, cleaning, etc. are key is exploding. Over the years, we as a community have adapted our conferences to accommodate and encourage such growth. For instance, the CIDR conference targets preliminary papers that provide a forum to exchange radically new ideas. Conferences such as VLDB and SIGMOD have created special tracks to promote research in data science and to provide a forum to share experiences dealing with data analysis in diverse application settings.

The objective of the ICDE 2026 Data Engineering Future Technologies (DEFT) Track is to look forward to providing near-term visions for data engineering and analytics. The submissions must therefore provide a well-articulated problem statement and motivations to set the stage, solution space and, possibly, some preliminary studies. The papers may be speculative, not perfect, but must be thought provoking, with basis on science and technology.

As in previous years, we have a panel of distinguished special track PC members that consists of senior members of our community (see below). Out of the 3 Track Co-Chairs and 18 PC Members, 11 are ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award winners, including a Turing Award winner. The DEFT track offers an opportunity to share your vision of novel challenges faced by future data systems, novel use cases/applications of data management technologies in emerging areas. It also provides a unique opportunity to get feedback on your futuristic research from distinguished senior researchers in our community.

Papers of Interest for This Special Track

We welcome submissions in the following two categories. The categories listed below are not intended to be exhaustive. Papers that do not necessarily fall into one of these two categories will also be considered. However, papers that are more suitable for the traditional research and data science tracks should NOT be submitted here.

Restrictions and Guidelines

Submission Length: 6-12 pages, double column, IEEE format. It is recommended that papers be closer to 6 pages than the maximum limit of 12 (not including the references).

Number of Submissions: Each person can co-author NO MORE than 2 submissions of which, he/she can be a lead author of at most one paper.

Submissions from DEFT Track PC: We encourage members of the DEFT track PC to consider submitting papers as well. Since the DEFT track PC list is small, to maintain anonymity of reviews further, for papers co-authored by DEFT track PC members, we may seek reviewers from regular PC as needed. Submissions should be done via Microsoft CMT at the following link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICDEDEFT2026.

Dates: ICDE 2026 DEFT track will have only one round of submissions. All deadlines are 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth (AoE). Abstracts must be submitted a week before full papers are due so that PC members can bid for papers that they would like to review. Full papers cannot be submitted if the abstracts aren't submitted in time.