SIGKDD Awards

Thorsten Joachims, professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University, is recognized 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.”