News

We are proud to announce that Athena Research Center researchers have received the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at ICDE 2026, the 42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering held in Montréal, Canada (May 4-8 2026). ICDE is one of the most prestigious and competitive venues in the field of data management and data-intensive systems, attracting leading researchers and engineers from around the world. 

 

Dimitris Tsitsigkos, post-doctoral researcher at ARCHIMEDES Unit, and Manolis Terrovitis, Research Director at IMSI, received this award for their work titled "B^S-tree: A Gapped Data-Parallel B-tree". B^S-tree is a novel in-memory B⁺-tree index that leverages SIMD instructions for fast parallel processing. Its key innovation, allowing gaps inside tree nodes, enables branchless searches and updates, while a built-in compression method reduces memory usage. In extensive experiments, BS-tree outperforms both traditional and learned indices across a variety of query and update workloads.

 

The work is the result of a collaboration with affiliated researchers at Athena RC Prof. Nikos Mamoulis and Achilleas Michalopoulos (PhD cand), from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina. The paper was presented as part of the Indexing Structures and Physical Database Design session at the conference's Query Processing, Indexing, and Optimization track, and the award was received by Prof. Nikos Mamoulis in the Awards Session held on May 6th, 2026.