2016 conference award recognises the research behind recommender systems

This year’s Seoul Test of Time Award, presented at the World Wide Web Conference in Montreal, recognises the authors of one of the most important research papers in the field of recommender systems.

LinkedIn scientist Dr Badrul Sarwar and University of Minnesota Professors George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, and John Riedl (posthumous) received the prestigious award at WWW2016in April. Their paper, titled ‘Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms’ was presented at the 10th International World Wide Web Conference in 2001 and is now regarded as the seminal scholarly reference for item-item collaborative filtering.

“This outstanding paper has had a considerable real-world impact,” said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Chair of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). “Many collaborative filtering systems now use this approach, including systems from Amazon. The paper has over 5,000 citations in Google Scholar, while the rate of citation has increased five-fold over the last 10 years.”

Inaugurated in 2014, the Seoul Test of Time Award is awarded annually for a paper presented at a previous World Wide Web conference which has had lasting value and impact. The first Award, presented at WWW2015 in Florence, was made to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, for their world-changing paper – ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’, presented at the World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane in 1998.

This year’s award will be presented during the conference on Wednesday 13 April.

The WWW conference series aims to provide the world with a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the web, the standardisation of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conferences bring together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures – all those who are passionate about the web and what it has to offer.

“Over the last 25 years WWW has provided an exciting forum to discuss some of the really ground-breaking aspects of the Web at an early stage of their development,” said Professor Hall. “It is a particular honour for us – through the Test of Time Award – to celebrate the work of our close colleagues, whose work has had such a great impact on the World Wide Web and on society in general.”