The Web Science Trust (WST) announced today that the inaugural Web Science Trust Test of Time Award was presented to the authors of the paper “Social media as a measurement tool of depression in populations”, Munmun De Choudhury (Georgia Tech), Scott Counts (Microsoft Research) and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research). The authors are the first recipients of this newly established annual award.
The award was presented during the opening ceremony of the 14th ACM Web Science Conference hosted by the ICT department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.
The paper was first presented at the 2013 ACM Web Science Conference in Paris, France and will be re-presented during a keynote presentation on Wednesday 29 June during this year’s conference.
Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the Web Science Trust, who announced the award at the opening ceremony, said: “The Web Science Trust is delighted to announce the winners of our first Test of Time Award. It was hard choosing between some of the wonderful papers that have been presented over the last decade but the trustees felt that this paper captured an important analysis of nearly 70 thousand user posts to develop a novel social media depression index—helping us to understand more about the society that we shape (and that shapes us) through the Web. The paper has been well-cited and the issue of mental health certainly retains much relevance today.”
The authors commented: “We are very honoured to be the first recipients of this award and would like to thank the Web Science Trust for recognizing our 2013 paper and the direction of research that it represents.”
The ACM Web Science Conference 2022 will run as a hybrid conference from 26-29 June, where authors will present their work either in-person or remotely to participants gathering at the conference venue in Barcelona, or joining online, and will be co-located with the ACM Hypertext Conference and the ACM UMAP Conference. The Web Science Conference is an interdisciplinary conference where a multitude of research disciplines converge with the purpose of creating greater insight into a complex global Web which is more impactful than the sum of their individual parts.
About the Web Science Trust Test of Time Award
The Web Science Trust Test of Time Award was inaugurated in 2022 and will be awarded annually to the author or authors of a paper presented at a previous Web Science Conference that has stood the test of time through continued relevance and impact. The recipients of the award will receive a monetary prize, and an engraved award.
About the ACM Web Science Conference
The Web Science Conference has been held every year since 2009 and has been an ACM conference since 2011. It is a vibrant, interdisciplinary gathering engaging not only with Web Science researchers but with related and complementary disciplines. The series has produced nearly 700 publications that have been downloaded over 200,000 times. The conference is organized each year by a local team of volunteers in different parts of the world in collaboration with the Web Science Trust.
About the Web Science Trust
The Web Science Trust is a UK charity promoting the understanding of the Web, through education and research in the discipline of Web Science. It coordinates the Web Science network (WSTNet) of leading Web Science laboratories from around the world.