CIIR co-directors Bruce Croft, dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), and James Allan, chair of the CICS faculty, were recently honored with six of their papers chosen for ACM SIGIR Test of Time Awards.
The ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, established in 2014, "recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence, including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information retrieval research, and outside of the information retrieval research community (e.g. non-information retrieval research or industry)." In 2016, a ten-person committee selected pre-2002 papers to each receive a SIGIR Test of Time Award. The CIIR papers chosen for the award include:
| 2001 | Relevance based Language Models | V. Lavrenko & W. B. Croft | |
| 1998 | A Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval | J. M. Ponte & W. B. Croft | |
| 1998 | On-line New Event Detection and Tracking | J. Allan, R. Papka & V. Lavrenko | |
| 1996 | Query Expansion using Local and Global Document Analysis | J. Xu & W. B. Croft | |
| 1995 | Searching Distributed Collections with Inference Networks | J. Callan, Z. Lu & W. B. Croft | |
| 1990 | Inference Networks for Document Retrieval | H. Turtle & W. B. Croft |
In addition, two CIIR papers were chosen for SIGIR Test of Time Award Honorable Mention (for papers 10-12 years before):
| 2003 | Automatic image annotation and retrieval using cross-media relevance models (awarded at SIGIR 2015) | J. Jeon, V. Lavrenko, and R. Manmatha | |
| 2002 | Predicting query performance (awarded at SIGIR 2014) | Steve Cronen-Townsend, Yun Zhou, and W. Bruce Croft |