News

The 51st International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2025) was held in London, UK, from September 1-5, 2025, with a record-breaking attendance of over 1,200 registered participants. VLDB is a premier international forum for data management and scalable data science, featuring a broad programme of research talks, panels, tutorials, workshops, and award ceremonies. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from around the world.

 

Athena Research Center, through its Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI), had a prominent and award-winning presence at the conference. The paper “The UDFBench Benchmark for General-purpose UDF Queries” by Yannis Foufoulas, Theoni Palaiologou, and Alkis Simitsis received the VLDB 2025 Best EAB Paper Award, recognizing its innovative contribution to benchmarking and efficient evaluation of user-defined function queries. In addition, Alkis Simitsis was awarded the Distinguished Associated Editor Award,  in recognition of his outstanding service and impact on the organization of VLDB 2025.

 

Athena’s researchers made important technical and community contributions across the VLDB 2025 program. Minos Garofalakis co-organized the IDSR workshop which drew significant participation from industry and academia, including presentations from Alibaba, Huawei, Google, Neo4J, Meta, Microsoft, AWS, MIT, and U. Chicago. Yannis Ioannidis organized a well-attended panel on Open Science at VLDB 2025, featuring engaging discussions with Y. Diao (École Polytechnique), Dame W. Hall (University of Southampton), W. Lehner (TU Dresden), N. Manola (OpenAIRE), J. Stoyanovich (NYU), and M. Zaharia (UC Berkeley and DataBricks co-founder). Stavros Maroulis and George Papastefanatos presented another IMSI paper “ExperimentLens: Interactive Visual Analytics and Explainability for ML Experiment Management” at the GuideAI workshop.