Date Posted: 11/29/2022

“Given a snapshot of a social network, can we infer which new interactions among its members are likely to occur in the near future?”  

Thus asks the 2003 paper and recent Test of Time Award-winning research from Jon Kleinberg, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and David Liben-Nowell ’99, currently a professor of computer science and associate provost at Carleton College. 

The duo’s paper, "The link prediction problem for social networks," was recognized at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, which was held in October. Since its publication nearly 20 years ago, the paper has proved foundational in informing early work that developed link recommendation algorithms for social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. 

It’s also cited in some of the initial papers laying the foundations for modern graph neural networks and was an early paper to use publishing and co-authoring data from arxiv.org for network research.