The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) awarded Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, the 2025 Test of Time Award.
The honor recognizes papers published at least 10 years ago that have impacted the field of computational social science, and was given on June 25 at the ICWSM annual meeting, held this year in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil received the award for his paper, "Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities," published in 2015 in the Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. He shares the award with co-authors Justin Cheng '12, a data scientist at Discord, and Jure Leskovec, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and now a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
"This paper is particularly meaningful to me personally," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil said in his acceptance statement. "It was my first as a faculty member at Cornell, but it also grew out of earlier work during my time as a postdoc at Stanford and as a faculty at Max Planck."
A key insight of this seminal work is that typically, the people perpetuating offensive and disruptive behavior online aren't just stereotypical trolls. Often, they are regular community members whose behavior shifts over time in response to context, misunderstandings, or accumulated grievances. Additionally, these members show early signs in the way they communicate, which can indicate a future shift to trollish behavior.
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil said these findings have shaped much of his work over the last decade.
"That insight opened up a new research direction…what we now call conversational forecasting – a new class of NLP models that can predict the future outcome of a conversation," he said. These models can assist community members in difficult conversations and offer an alternative to more restrictive moderation practices.
"These conversational forecasting models have since been applied to predicting a range of conversational outcomes – beyond antisocial behavior – including in high-stakes domains like mental health support," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil said.
In addition to the Test of Time Award, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil has also previously received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Google Research Faculty Award, and numerous best paper awards.
Patricia Waldron is a writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.