The field of data management has witnessed landscape changes in the last decades. After the huge success of relational databases, there was a period of uncertainty as researchers explored the next milestones, but a lot of efforts did not meet the highest expectation, including efforts that had been devoted to access methods, XML, stream processing, etc. Recently, the field is burgeoning with even more exciting topics, for example, big data. Today, the field of data management is facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities brought by topics such as big data. Research has the potential to deliver what it delivered 4 decades ago to the success of RDBMs. However, the challenges are daunting. Data management is a cross-disciplinary field that requires understanding and collaboration of many other fields including systems, information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, and even artificial intelligence. There is an urgency to broaden ourselves to meet these challenges. We need to expand our horizon beyond the traditional topics of data management. We feel organizing research seminars and conferences is important to achieve this goal. On Nov. 18, 2011, a group of database researchers mostly from Beijing (Yueguo Chen, Bin Cui, Guoliang Li, Jian Li, Jiaheng Lu, Shaoxu Song, Haixun Wang, Ge Yu, Xuan Zhou, Lei Zou) met at Microsoft Research Asia for a brief discussion on how to intensify our efforts. We agreed that although there are many local database conferences, the scope of the conferences is still mostly in the traditional areas, and their focus on soliciting, reviewing, and presenting papers has displaced the efforts on technical discussions. We decided to create a venue for pure technical discussion, and we want to invite distinguished researchers, especially people outside our area to give lectures on the latest developments in their fields. This leads to the HotDB seminar. About 3rd HotDB The third seminar will have two keynotes and six tutorials that cover quite a few topics in several related fields. We are honored to invite distinguished professors and corporate executives, as well as young stars, to share their insights in data management. We cordially invite researchers and students to participate the seminar and contribute to the discussions.