Proceedings of the 2013 Sigmod/PODS Ph.D. symposium on PhD symposium

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2013 Sigmod/PODS Ph.D. Symposium, which is co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2013 and takes place on Sunday June 23rd, 2013 in New York City, USA. 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 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 have two tracks for submission. The General Track is for students who are in early stages of their studies; the submissions specify the problem they plan to focus on, the thesis that they plan to investigate, and the outline of the methodology that they plan to follow. The Towards Graduation Track is for students who expect to graduate by the end of 2013; the submissions specify the contributions they have made and what remains to be accomplished. We received 26 papers in response to the call for papers: 14 for the General Track and 12 for the Towards Graduation Track. Each of these was reviewed by three PC members with a focus on selecting submissions that were ready and could benefit from the feedbacks. In the end, we selected 12 submissions, 6 for each track, for discussions at the Symposium. The proceedings include short descriptions of these PhD theses.