This year's SIGIR best paper award was presented to Mikhail Ageev (Moscow State University), and Qi Guo, Dmitry Lagun, and Eugene Agichtein (Emory University) for their paper Find It If You Can: A Game for Modeling Different Types of Web Search Success Using Interaction Data in which they propose a principled formalization of different types of success for informational search, and a scalable game-like infrastructure for crowdsourcing search behavior studies.
The best student paper award was awarded to Shuang-Hong Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Bo Long and Alexander J. Smola (Yahoo! Labs), Hongyuan Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Zhaohui Zheng (Yahoo! Labs Beijing) for their paper Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice. The paper proposes Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems.
There were honorable mentions for the papers: Parameterized Concept Weighting in Verbose Queries, Understanding Re-finding Behaviour in Naturalistic Email Interaction Log, Out of sight, not out of mind: On the effect of social and physical detachment on information need, Enhanced Results for Web Search, and Recommending Ephemeral Items at Web Scale.