Paul Resnick, Michael D. Cohen Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, will receive the “CSCW Lasting Impact Award” for groundbreaking research he co-authored. The award honors “GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews,” published at the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW).

The award recognizes a paper published at the CSCW conference at least 10 years ago that has been extremely influential since its publication.

GroupLens was one of the first automated online recommendation systems, originally designed to help people find articles they would like in the huge stream of content on Usenet.  Servers collected ratings from users and used those ratings to predict which articles other users might like to read. 

This early research from Resnick and his co-authors Neophytos Iacovou, Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, and John Riedl eventually led the way to the now ubiquitous recommender systems deployed across a wide range of commercial and social media applications. 

"It's a great honor to receive this recognition,” says Resnick. “John Riedl and I had a sense in 1994 that we were on to something important with the idea of leveraging other people's subjective reactions as a resource for filtering information. But we could never have predicted with a straight face just how ubiquitous recommender systems would become. I only wish that John were still with us to participate in this event."

The GroupLens paper and its authors will be honored at a special session at the 2019 CSCW conference November 9-13, 2019 in Austin, Texas.

About Paul Resnick

Paul Resnick is the Michael D. Cohen Collegiate Professor of Information, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs at the School of Information and Director of the Center for Social Media Responsibility. Resnick is a driving force in the rapidly evolving social computing field. In addition to his work with GroupLens, he was also among the first to recognize online reputation as an important research topic and pioneered methods to protect reputation systems from manipulation.

About CSCW

CSCW is a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, and communities. The conference brings together top researchers and practitioners from academia and industry who are interested in both the technical and social aspects of collaboration.

- Jessica Webster, UMSI PR specialist