Qiaozhu Mei earns 2026 Seoul Test of Time Award

University of Michigan School of Information professor Qiaozhu Mei has earned the 2026 Seoul Test of Time Award from the ACM Web Conference Steering Committee.

The award recognizes papers that have made a significant and lasting contribution to the web research community. Originally presented at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference in Florence, Italy, in 2015, the paper introduced LINE, an algorithm designed to help computers analyze massive information networks, including networks with millions or tens of millions of nodes. 

“This is a huge recognition because it reflects the broader community’s view that the work made a lasting contribution to the field,” Qiaozhu says. 

The paper, "LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding" was co-authored by Jian Tang, Meng Qu, Mingzhe Wang, Ming Zhang and Jun Yan. 

At the time, researchers were working to understand how to represent and analyze the enormous networks that shape the web. In these networks, nodes can represent webpages, people, words, products or other pieces of information, while edges represent the relationships between them.

LINE helped address that challenge by representing nodes and relationships in a continuous geometric space, making it easier for computers to reason through complex networks and identify meaningful patterns.

The paper has received more than 7,000 citations and helped advance the field of network embedding, which Mei describes as an important step toward the representation methods used in modern artificial intelligence.

“If you think about large language models and other AI models, they essentially embed human language, images and other types of data into continuous spaces where reasoning can happen,” Mei says. “This paper was among a small set of early works that began to understand what we now see as a basic representation strategy for modern AI.” 

Mei says UMSI has provided an open and collegial environment for the research, even when the work was highly technical and its broader impact was still emerging.

“At the time, this paper was considered very technical,” Mei says. “It was not always easy to explain to colleagues why we were creating this continuous space to represent nodes and edges. But I was fortunate enough to be in an environment where colleagues were open-minded, supportive, and willing to see the potential in work whose impact was still taking shape.”

The award will be presented during the opening ceremony of the 35th international conference in the ACM Web Conference series in Dubai in July 2026. 

Qiaozhu Mei is the associate dean for research and innovation at UMSI. He is also a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the U-M College of Engineering. Mei earned a faculty recognition award in 2020 for his remarkable contribution to the university through his scholarly research excellence as a teacher, advisor and mentor. Mei received the Michael D. Cohen Outstanding Service Award, University of Michigan School of Information, and was named an

ACM Distinguished Member in 2017. 

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Learn more about Qiaozhu Mei’s research by visiting his UMSI faculty profile.