DEFT was created in 2023, at ICDE 2023 in Anaheim, as an experiment: a special track distinct from the Research and Industry & Applications tracks, dedicated entirely to innovative, forward-looking ideas. The experiment worked. DEFT has run at every ICDE since, and is now a standing track of the conference with its own steering committee.

Our field is growing in several directions at once. New systems with new capabilities appear constantly, database technologies keep finding their way into domains nobody designed them for, and data science — curation, wrangling, cleaning, and everything around it — continues to expand. The community has adapted its venues to keep up. DEFT is ICDE’s answer: a track whose objective is to look forward and articulate near-term visions for data engineering and analytics.

DEFT submissions are position papers. They are expected to give a well-articulated problem statement and motivation to set the stage, sketch a solution space, and possibly report preliminary studies. They may be speculative. They need not be perfect. They must be thought provoking and grounded in science and technology. Two broad categories recur in our calls for papers, though neither is meant to be exhaustive:

• Vision papers — use cases and scenarios that push past the limits of existing systems, articulating why the use case matters, where current technology falls short, and what direction the future should take.
• Expanding the landscape — database technologies applied in novel ways to problems in other domains, and emerging applications built around data itself, from data pricing and data markets to entirely new data-centric settings.

Papers better suited to the traditional research, data science, or industry  tracks should be submitted there instead.