The Best Paper Award at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference was given to Lars Backstrom (Cornell PhD student), Cynthia Dwork (Senior Researcher at Microsoft and Cornell alum), and Jon Kleinberg (Cornell faculty), for their paper, "Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography".
The paper, presented by Lars at the conference in Banff, is concerned with the ways in which anonymization can fail to protect the privacy of individual nodes in social network data.