Letter from the New TCDE Chair

I am deeply humbled and honored for the opportunity to serve as the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE). TCDE is the flagship international society for data management and database systems researchers and practitioners. I thank the trust of all TCDE members. Let me start to pay our tribute to my predecessor, Kyu-Young Whang. Under his leadership, the visibility of TCDE has been greatly increased, through the initiation of TCDEAwards program to recognize the people in our community who have made significant impact in data engineering research, system development, applications and education, and the TCDE Archive taskforce to maintain the cooperate memory of TCDE activities including ICDE conferences. The membership of TCDE has increased in the last a couple of years more than three times to now nearly 1000 members. TCDE continued to develop close collaborative relationship with SIGMOD and VLDB in order to build a healthier and stronger database community. TCDEs financial position has also been strengthened, that gives us more room to provide better support to our members and TCDE related activities. TCDE was evaluated as Excellent by IEEE Technical & Conference Activities Board in 2014. Previous TCDE Chairs, Paul Larson, David Lomet and Kyu-Young Whang, have established an excellent framework for TCDE. As the new Chair of TCDE, I will lead TCDE under this framework. One of my priorities is to work with the ICDE steering committee as well as the VLDB Endowment and ACM SIGMOD to ensure that ICDE maintains its status as a top quality international database conference. The Data Engineering Bulletin is TCDEs flagship publication with a proud history of 37 years. I thank the Editor-in-Chief, David Lomet and his editorial board to their dedicated work to provide this invaluable service to our community. We will strengthen our support the Data Engineering Bulletin to make it continuously to be a high value information source for all TCDE members and the broader community. TCDE to IEEE is similar to SIGMOD to ACM. During my term as the Chair, I will continue to increase the visibility of TCDE, to bring to the level of SIGMOD. We will continue to promote the TCDE Award program, to further increase the TCDE membership, and to encourage more people to engage with TCDE. With the support of the TCDE Executive Committee members, previous TCDE chairs, and most importantly, all TCDE members, I am confident that I could lead TCDE to the next level. Xiaofang Zhou University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia