Best Paper Awards in Computer Science Since 1996

And by a nice margin. IBM is quite far below, I'd never expect that.

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.

MSR attracts some of the best researchers and makes it easy to get research done. No teaching requirements, grant applications or scrambling for funding. Just research. I sincerely hope tomorrow's Microsoft keeps MSR well-funded, it's a benefit to the whole community.

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

Looking at Google scholar results might be interesting:

http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computergra...

If you are a member of a public library in a metropolitan area, take a look at the available journals and journal databases there. You might be pleasantly surprised.

It's not "freely" available but it's not something that everyone has to pay publishers directly for.

Hmm. Most that I clicked on were freely available. The links go to Google Scholar searches, and most of those indicate that a PDF is available.

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.

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.

In CS, conference papers act much like journal papers (though often quite a bit shorter). Unlike journal papers, a talk or poster (by one of the authors) is also required to be presented at the conference in order to have the paper published. Though there are exceptions, the majority of these conferences are published in either ACM or IEEE libraries.

The Best Paper Award is typically some combination of a decision by the Program Committee, aggregated votes by attendees of the conference, and input from the paper reviewers who originally peer-reviewed the work.

There isn't a single metric for the award, and it can be quite subjective: sometimes it is an innovate topic, sometimes it is simply an interesting perspective, sometimes it is a well-executed presentation (even if the research itself wasn't all that interesting), sometimes it is because the authors used a difficult-to-acquire or real-world data set (internal Google or Microsoft data, game data directly from Blizzard), sometimes it is because of a challenging participant base (for example, interviewing minorities in elementary schools or a longitudinal study tracking participants over a decade), and sometimes it is simply excellent experimental design and statistical analysis.

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...

You can get some of this from Google Scholar's metrics pages, which list, for each venue, the most-cited papers since 2008. These indeed seem to be different than the best-paper selections, though I haven't examined this systematically. (I guess you could take the best-paper and look at its citation rank out of papers that year. But this raises other questions; for example, is the point of best paper award to select the paper that will be most influential?)

From this page, http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en... , click "Subcategories" under "Engineering & Computer Science": for example, "Artificial Intelligence," "Computational Linguistics," or "Human Computer Interaction." It lists the most-cited-venues for each area, but if you click on a particular venue you get its list of most-cited-papers.

Here are a few that are also on Jeff Huang's list:

ICML: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

NIPS: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

AAAI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_artificiali...

ACL: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

EMNLP: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computation...

CHI: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_humancomput...

CVPR: http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_computervis...

A site that lists both (building off this one) is http://arnetminer.org/conferencebestpapers

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.

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

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.