Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval alums Jeremy Pickens (Ph.D. '04) and Chirag Shah (M.S. '06) along with co-authors Gene Golovchinsky, 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." Pickens is a Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Labs and Shah is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.