12 Years Later, CCDS Research Still Making Waves

A research paper first presented at ACM SIGIR 2013 has earned the ACM SIGIR 2025 Test of Time Honorable Mention Award – a prestigious recognition reserved for work that has shaped the field of information retrieval for over a decade.

The paper, “Time-aware Point-of-Interest Recommendation,” explored how user behaviour and location data could be modelled to better predict where people might want to go next. Originally presented by NTU researchers in 2013, the study has since become a cornerstone reference in spatiotemporal data mining and recommendation systems – technologies that underpin everything from location-based services to urban computing.

When the paper was first published, Quan Yuan and Zongyang Ma were PhD students, while Gao Cong, Aixin Sun and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann were NTU faculty members. Today, A/P Sun serves as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Prof Cong is Head of the Division of Data Science at CCDS, continuing to advance the kind of foundational research that earns international recognition.

The award will be formally presented at SIGIR 2025 in Padova, Italy, where the paper will also be reprinted in the December issue of SIGIR Forum with a commemorative preface from the award committee.

This enduring recognition speaks to the long-term impact of foundational research at NTU and CCDS. It affirms the global relevance and research excellence of the college in fields that continue to influence both academia and real-world applications today.

Congratulations to the authors on this well-deserved honour.