Two major awards were granted at the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD) to Rediet Abebe (Ph.D. '19) and CS Professor Thorsten Joachims.
Rediet Abebe—advised by Jon Kleinberg, Cornell CS's first Black woman Ph.D., currently at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and soon to be Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley—won the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award for her doctoral thesis, Designing Algorithms for Social Good. This annual award by ACM SIGKDD recognizes "excellent research by doctoral candidates in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery." Learn more from CS News about Abebe's many activities and achievements (be sure to scroll down).
Also at 2020 ACM SIGKDD, Thorsten Joachims, professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University, was recognized with an Innovation Award for his
research contributions in machine learning, including influential work studying human biases in information retrieval, support vector machines (SVM) and structured output prediction. Notably, Joachims pioneered methods for eliciting reliable preferences from implicit feedback, methods for unbiased learning-to-rank and ranking methods that provide fairness guarantees. The ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award is the highest honor for technical excellence in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. It is conferred on an individual or group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations have greatly influenced the direction of research and development in the field.
"I am greatly honored by this recognition from the KDD community," said Joachims. "KDD is known for innovation—not only as an academic endeavor, but also with an eye towards real-world impact and social good."