This year’s Seoul Test of Time Award, to be presented at the World Wide Web Conference in Montreal, will recognize 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) will receive the prestigious award at the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2016), taking place in Montreal from 11 to 15 April this year. Their paper – ‘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,’ she added. ‘The paper has over 5000 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 standardization 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.’

Notes to Editors

1. This news release is issued on behalf of the IW3C2 (the International World Wide Web Conference Committee). For further information contact: "contact at iw3c2 dot org"
2. The International World-Wide Web Conference Committee is the Association that organizes global academic conferences on Web technology: /iw3c2/conferences; for this year’s Conference, see: http://www2016.ca/
3. Dr Badrul Sarwar’s work on this topic took place while he was undertaking his PhD at the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 2001. He now works for LinkedIn.