CIIR alumnus Jeremy Pickens (Ph.D. '04) and co-authors Gene Golovchinsky, Chirag Shah (CIIR alum; MS '06), Pernilla Qvarfordt, and Maribeth Back received the Best Paper Award at the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '08) for their paper "Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Exploratory Search." Jeremy is a Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Labs and Chirag is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.