
Best Paper Awards in Computer Science since 1996 - lazyjeff
https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html
======
kilburn
Please don't link to google scholar. Link to the conference websites directly
if you can, or otherwise to DBLP [1].

Most of these conferences are open access and make a good effort to get the
papers they publish to the widest audience possible. Google scholar typically
hot-links the PDFs, and keeps them invisible link-wise. This is slowly eroding
the conference's "web reputation" (based on links primarily) and keeps
funneling users to the big corps, something we really don't need these days ;)

[1] [https://dblp.uni-trier.de/](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/)

~~~
andrepd
Thank you, I didn't know about that website!

------
cs702
Thank you for doing this!

Quick suggestion:

Please consider including best paper awards from NeurIPS (e.g.,
[https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017/Awards](https://nips.cc/Conferences/2017/Awards)).

~~~
toxik
Unrelated but NIPS changing name to NeurIPS has just drawn more attention to
the alleged inappropriateness of its former name.

~~~
benrbray
Yeah, the new name is pretty crude. I wish they had either changed the name
completely or simply permuted the letters: PINS, SPIN, SNIP...

~~~
joaomacp
SNIP sounds cool, and makes sense as well: Systems for Neural Information
Processing

------
boulos
While not as "top tier" as siggraph, HPG (the merger/successor of Graphics
Hardware and the Ray Tracing Symposium) has a reasonable best paper list:
[https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/2019/best-
paper/](https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/2019/best-paper/)

As a note, the first paper listed when it's 1. 2. 3. was the "best" paper (the
others were runners up).

------
jacques_chester
This list is a reminder that the work done by researchers and the work done in
industry have profoundly little overlap, outside of a handful of high-profile
examples.

If the giants would like to do us all a massive favour: pay the IEEE and ACM
for worldwide, perpetual, ongoing rights to their libraries. Because right now
that vast ocean of literature is basically invisible to practitioners.

~~~
robotresearcher
Most of those papers’ first authors were in industry shortly afterwards. Most
grad students go directly to industry and take their knowledge with them.

~~~
earthicus
Is that really how research in CS works? Certainly we hear about grad students
doing lots of the work in laboratory sciences like biology, but in more
analytic subjects like mathematics or theoretical physics its not true at all.
Grad students making significant contributions is _extremely_ rare; basically
all of the real research is done by tenured professors.

Can those of you who did postgrad CS tell us how much of the research is
actually done by grad students vs professors?

~~~
chrisseaton
> Grad students making significant contributions is extremely rare; basically
> all of the real research is done by tenured professors.

...but most of these first authors (the people formally credited with doing
the real work) are graduate students, so how does that fit in with your
theory?

~~~
earthicus
I specifically made that claim of mathematics and theoretical physics, and
requested first hand accounts of how it worked in CS.

~~~
chrisseaton
So how does it work in your field? Making your own significant contribution is
literally the basic standard required for a PhD in most fields.

~~~
earthicus
Well i think it just depends on how 'significant' you need the phd to be. As
an example of what I mean, consider the first issue of this years Annals of
mathematics [1] and note that there is not a single grad student on any of the
papers, first author or otherwise.

[1]
[http://annals.math.princeton.edu/2018/188-1](http://annals.math.princeton.edu/2018/188-1)

------
AndrewKemendo
The by-instituion ranking is particularly interesting:
[https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions](https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions)

Some of those are obvious if you've been in the field a while, but I think
it's notable that big names like Intel, Harvard and NASA are so lowly ranked
when compared to others on the list.

Also Notable, none of the big names in the field won any of these: Jeff Dean,
Geoff Hinton, Yann Lecun, Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, Jurgen Schmidhuber etc...

~~~
azhenley
Jeff Dean has won paper awards. For example, he won the Best Paper Award at
EuroSys 2018: [http://eurosys2018.org/awards/](http://eurosys2018.org/awards/)

Andrew Ng has too:
[http://www.robotics.stanford.edu/~ang/papers.php](http://www.robotics.stanford.edu/~ang/papers.php)

This list just contains a very small number of conferences.

------
vowelless
Great list, with a lot of work put in there! In particular, the breakdown by
institutions is very interesting --
[https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions](https://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html#institutions)

Related, the most cited CS papers (although very dated at this point ...):

[http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stats/articles](http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/stats/articles)

------
acbart
CS Education venues never show up on these lists. In some cases, it's
intentional and in others it's accidental. Either way, I wonder if we'll ever
see the same respect as our peers in CS. It's a weird spot to be in.

~~~
azhenley
I think it’ll change with the rise of ICER and the recent push from SIGCSE to
have a research track.

Quite a few faculty job postings have even been for CS Ed researchers :)

------
LeanderK
doesn't look too good for german institutions (or europe in general) :( I
thought it we are just not really that important in machine learning, but
other disciplines are similiar. Any physicist here? Are german institutions
more visible in physics? They always appear to have quite big physics
faculties.

~~~
chrisseaton
A lot of these people are European, or working in European locations such as
MSR's Cambridge lab, but they do tend to be working for American institutions.
The failure is our institutions, not our people.

~~~
LeanderK
yeah, i agree. there's a crazy brain drain. Just look at TUM. If they could
hold onto the talents they developed they would count Schmidhuber, Hochreiter,
Schaal, (Marcus) Hutter etc. to their faculty and would be a serious
competitor in the global ML landscape.

------
xpuente
Seems like computer architecture is not computer science. Nice.

------
amelius
Note that Microsoft Research is far above any other companies in the list (see
last table on the page).

------
adolfont
Read Alfie Kohn to understand how such a list is stupid.

------
mlevental
man this is fantastic - thanks a lot jeff!

------
jeanlou
I'm surprised this list does not include David Lowe seminal paper on SIFT:
"Distinctive Image Features from Scale - Invariant Key points"

------
karxxm
No VIS?

