Zoubin Ghahramani awarded classic paper prize at ICML 2013

The 2013 Classic Paper Prize at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) was won by Zoubin Ghahramani and coauthors Xiaojin Zhu and John Lafferty for their 2003 paper “Semi-Supervised Learning Using Gaussian Fields and Harmonic Functions” . The Classic Paper Prize is given to the paper published at ICML 10 years previously which has had the most impact on the field. Semi-supervised learning refers to the problem of combining small amounts of labelled data (i.e. supervised learning) with large amounts of unlabelled data (i.e. unsupervised learning). This 2003 paper, which has now been cited over 1400 times, developed a simple and highly-scalable graph-based method for semi-supervised classification, and related it to harmonic functions, random walks, electric networks, and spectral graph theory. Graph-based semi-supervised learning has now become a standard approach for combining labelled and unlabelled data in many application domains.

Link to the paper: http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/papers/zgl.pdf
Link to the ICML conference: http://icml.cc/2013/
Link to the Machine Learning group website: http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/