PhD student Wenlei Xie, David Bindel, Al Demers, and Johannes Gehrke have won one of two Best Student Paper awards at KDD 2015 for their paper "Edge-Weighted Personalized PageRank: Breaking A Decade-Old Performance Barrier". Their algorithm outperforms existing methods for computing PageRank on general graphs when the edge weights are personalized by nearly five orders of magnitude.
The ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining is the largest and highest quality conference on Data Mining, Data Science, and Knowledge Discovery.
More coverage from Cornell Chronicle: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/02/search-engines-will-know-what-you-want-sooner