Jon Kleinberg, together with Christos Faloutsos and former Cornell postdoc Jure Leskovec won the 2016 SIGKDD Test of Time Award for their 2005 KDD paper, "Graphs over Time: Densification Laws, Shrinking Diameters and Possible Explanations."
From the announcement: "The paper makes new discoveries about how real-world graphs and networks grow and evolve over time. These discoveries fundamentally shaped our understanding of the evolution and growth of real-world networks, and the paper spurred a rich line of research on measuring and modeling the structure and evolution of networks across many domains. [The paper's] observations were fundamentally different from what was believed about the evolution of networks at the time they appeared."
This is the third year of the SIGKDD Test of Time Award, and Cornell faculty have been among the recipients in each of the years it was conferred: Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos in 2014 (with Cornell PhD alum David Kempe); Thorsten Joachims in 2015; and Jon Kleinberg in 2016.
The award recognizes "outstanding papers from past KDD Conferences beyond the last decade that have had an important impact on the data mining research community."