
Best Paper Awards in Computer Science Since 1996 - whathappenedto
http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html##
======
greenyoda
At the bottom of the list is a summary of the number of "best papers" by
institution. Interestingly, Microsoft Research is at the top of the list:

    
    
        Microsoft Research                     32.4
        Stanford University                    26.8
        Massachusetts Institute of Technology  24.6
        University of Washington               24.1
        Carnegie Mellon University             22.9
        University of California Berkeley      19.5
        ...

~~~
jackowayed
MSR is very well-regarded, rather autonomous from Microsoft's product
division, and likely larger than any university's CS department. It's not much
easier to get a principal researcher there than a professorship at a great
university.

They're not as broad as most universities, but they pretty reliably have the
most papers in top systems conferences like OSDI and SOSP.

~~~
grad_ml
I understand what are you trying to say. But this is a not a reasonable
comparison.

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raphman
Just a small caveat: There is some evidence that best paper awards do not
really correlate with great influence of those papers, as measured by the
number of citations a paper receives afterwards [1].

[1]
[http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalys...](http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalysisOfTheCHI/)

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lambda
Too bad SIGGRAPH doesn't give such an award; I was curious to look at the top
graphics papers.

~~~
davvid
Not top papers, but you can read many of the accepted papers by following the
author links here:
[http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html](http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html)

~~~
lambda
Thanks! I was interested in seeing the list of "best papers" just to see what
the most interesting or innovative research over the years has been, but this
is all good stuff too.

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olalonde
I know this topic has been done to death but it still blows my mind that most
of those papers are not freely available. It would be nice if the freely
available ones were marked as such in the list.

~~~
anologwintermut
It still blows my mind that people claim this is true. Almost all CS papers
are on the author's website, eprint, arxiv, etc. Google scholar even links to
them.

Don't get be wrong, closed publications are a travesty. But they are a
travesty because institutions pay out of government grant money (indirectly
via overhead) to pay for subscriptions and because it's government funded
research. They are not, at least in anything approaching the average case, a
travesty because researchers cannot access results.

~~~
olalonde
Really? I just clicked 10 random link and all Google Scholar searches
redirected to a [http://dl.acm.org/](http://dl.acm.org/) paywall. Maybe I'm
missing something?

edit: Ah, I just noticed some searches have a direct link to the PDF next to
the main search result "[PDF] from _domain_ ".

~~~
anologwintermut
The primary link is almost always to the canonical version which is usually
the pay walled one(even if it's not the most in depth version the author
wrote). Did you check for the links on the right hand side? Those are the
pdf's that google found. Of a pseudo random set I clicked on, all had links.

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piyushpr134
For a lot of these links, I am not able to find the pdf as they are behind
signups or paywall. sad state of affairs

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konceptz
Interestingly, "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" was not on this list.

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

------
sadfaceunread
An interesting list. I'd enjoy seeing this in other fields besides CS.

~~~
theOnliest
I'm not sure how far afield from CS you actually want to go, but the list for
music theory is at
[http://societymusictheory.org/archive/publications](http://societymusictheory.org/archive/publications).

~~~
sadfaceunread
I would be interested in physical/chemical sciences MRS, APS and ACS come to
mind as examples of things with annual meetings which might have best paper
awards.

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benrapscallion
As a biologist, where we emphasize publication over conferences, I am really
curious as to what "best" means? Innovative? Most data to back hypothesis?

~~~
scott_s
In support of barik's comment, I want to add that conference papers in
computer science are peer reviewed, and the top conferences have an acceptance
rate that is usually less than 15%. Simply, conference papers, rather than
journal articles, is where most innovative computer science work goes. This is
very true for systems, languages, software engineering, databases and HCI, but
less so for the more theoretical areas.

This topic comes up when talking with researchers outside of computer science
so often that the Computer Science Research Association wrote up a memo
explaining it: [http://cra.org/resources/bp-
view/evaluating_computer_scienti...](http://cra.org/resources/bp-
view/evaluating_computer_scientists_and_engineers_for_promotion_and_tenure/)

~~~
wbsun
Peer review doesn't necessarily mean anything objective unless it is totally
doubly-blinded, which, ironically, is not used by many top system conferences.

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no_one_believes
What's the best tablet upon which to actually read all these papers?

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sideproject
An excellent list! Love it. Did you compile it manually?

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teraflop
Reposting a worthy comment from user chimmy, who has been hellbanned for 1.5
years for no apparent reason:

> This is a great list but I would rather look at the most cited papers from
> that conference (say 10 years later). As an example, MapReduce did not win
> the best paper in OSDI 2004. However, it has impacted the industry like no
> other paper in that conference.

~~~
LambdaAlmighty
What impacts industry 10 years later is more a measure of marketing and brand
association than academic excellence.

Google could fart now and the internet will still cry roses.

The same research/algorithms/software produced by an independent individual or
lab would simply die in obscurity.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
That's because, unlike physical science and engineering disciplines, the
application of discoveries in computer science (i.e. software engineering) is
done in the context of an ultra-competitive popularity-contest culture, mixed
with a strong strain of loner-nerd-hacking-the-gibson worship.

I came to software development from the physical sciences (university level
academic and theoretical as well as applied/engineering). To me the
differences were abundant and, frankly, shocking. For a discipline that
fancies itself one of the more intellectual, there seems to be an awful lot of
petty one-upsmanship and "john galt genius" idiocy at work.

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Arnor
Hmm... TL;DR?

~~~
lambda
Huh? It's a list of best papers. What kind of summary can you give of hundreds
of CS papers in different fields? "There sure is a lot of stuff you can do
with computers!"

greenyoda already included the first few lines of the summary of institutions
which contributed most to this list, which is about as close to a TL;DR as you
can get for this link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992714)

But really, what were you expecting a TL;DR to be? There's no way you can
summarize nearly two decades worth of computer science research in a single
TL;DR.

~~~
Arnor
_cough_ Irony _cough_

~~~
Arnor
Wooowee, did I ever strike a nerve :)

