The 2019 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) that kicked off in Vancouver earlier this week announced Microsoft’s Lin Xiao as the winner of the Test of Time award. The NeurIPS organizing committee announced the award and selection process on Monday in a Medium post.

The Test of Time award winner is given to AI researchers whose work has made important contributions to the AI field over the last ten years. The award winner is selected by a special committee which examines papers published ten years ago at NeurIPS that have had a particularly significant and lasting impact on the AI researcher community. The committee members this year included Amir Globerson, Antoine Bordes, Francis Bach and Iain Murray, who started from a list of 18 accepted papers to NeurIPS 2009 that have had the most citations since their publication. 

With focus papers that have enjoyed a sustained impact, the Test of Time award was given to Lin Xiao for his paper titled “Dual Averaging Method for Regularized Stochastic Learning and Online Optimization” published in 2009 which proposed a new online algorithm called Regularized Dual Averaging, or RDA. The paper has been cited more than 600 times by other researchers to date. Lin Xiao is currently the Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft.