We hear about professional conferences all the time, but not so much about what it takes to organize and execute such an event — or the people who do the heavy lifting.

In 2021, Divyakant (Divy) Agrawal, UC Santa Barbara computer science distinguished professor, widely recognized database and distributed-systems expert, CS department chair, and the Leadership Endowed Chair in Computer Science, was elected to a four-year term as chair of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGMOD. ACM is the largest professional organization in computer science. 

In March, Agrawal was named the recipient of the 2026 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, the highest service award among all the database conferences held under the ACM auspices. Formally, he received the annual award in recognition of his “transformative leadership of SIGMOD, modernizing its publication and conference models, and expanding its global reach.” More generally he was recognized for “outstanding service to the database field through new community initiatives, professional service, standards activities, and research.” The award, to be presented at the 2026 ACM SIGMOD conference, includes a plaque and an honorarium.

The conference covers a wide swath of data-related challenges, including large-scale data infrastructures, query-processing algorithms, and software used to manage large data sets. “With presentations from researchers and practitioners of innovative database architectures, the conference covers the gamut of computing,” Agrawal noted.
One of Agrawal’s most important responsibilities as chair of ACM SIGMOD was organizing the annual database conference. In that role, he made a series of carefully considered changes that positively affected all of the roughly one thousand people who attend the event each year, including students, professors, and postdoctoral researchers, as well as practitioners from industry leaders such as Oracle, IBM, Amazon, and Google. 

That sounds simple enough, but in truth, even getting started is a challenge. “One of the first things that happens every year is deciding where to hold the next conference, and every year, we were frantically looking around for a location,” recalls Agrawal, who came to UCSB in 1987. “I shifted from planning on a year-to-year basis to creating a horizon so that we began planning for multiple years. “Now we know where we’ll be three years from now.”

Agrawal also nudged what had traditionally been a U.S.-centric event to become much more internationally oriented. “Given the way things were evolving geopolitically, I tried to make it more international, and that has happened,” he said. Under his leadership, the conference made its South American debut in Santiago, Chile. Another was held in Berlin. The 2026 event will be hosted by Bangalore, India, the first time on the subcontinent; and a future conference will take place in Seoul, South Korea.
On another front, Agrawal changed the submission schedule for authors wanting to present papers at the conference. 

“There used to be a submission deadline only once a year,” he said. “We replaced that with a model of rolling quarterly submissions, which gave students, especially, a lot more flexibility.” Since that change, the number of submissions has more than doubled to roughly 1,200 per year with 200 to 250 being accepted for presentation.

Finally, Agrawal changed how conference papers are treated. They used to appear in an “independent proceedings” publication that was not produced as an archival journal. Rather, every presentation was listed separately, making it difficult to see groups of thematically related papers. “There was no continuity before, so we integrated the publication into a journal model,” Agrawal said. “Now, there is an archival-journal titled Proceedings of the ACM, which includes every conference publication.”

In discussing the award, Agrawal praised his longtime colleague and fellow CS faculty member Amr El Abbadi. Both  came to UCSB as junior faculty members in 1987, eventually to be recognized worldwide for their database and distributed-systems research, Agrawal explained, adding, “In some sense, this feels like a lifetime achievement award, and I share it with Amr in terms of recognizing UCSB as one of the important places for doing database research.” The two have collaborated on numerous projects and have jointly advised nearly fifty PhD students during their long careers. 

Finally, looking at the future of the CS Department, Agrawal says that he is pleased to see that both professors who are near retirement as well as students and professional researchers who are beginning their careers are all “on fire, doing great things.”