The 24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) opened on August 19 at the Excel Center in London, UK. Best Paper Awards go to a Technical University of Munich team for Adversarial Attacks on Classification Models for Graphs (Adversarial Attacks on Neural Networks for Graph Data) in the Research Track; and Real-time Personalization using Embeddings for Search Ranking at Airbnb, by a team from Airbnb, in the ADS Track.

The latest installment of the prestigious annual gathering set new records for registrations, sponsorships, submissions, and student awards. In an effort to expand to new fields and attract more scholars, KDD 2018 has introduced innovations such as Deep Learning Day and Health Day on top of its popular workshops and tutorials.

In his opening speech SIGKDD Chair Jian Pei encouraged researchers to join the SIGKDD community. KDD 2018 General Chairs Yike Guo and Faisal Farooq then gave an overview of the conference before the awards announcements, presided over by KDD 2018 Associate Chair Jie Tang.

A team from the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft won Best Student Paper (Research Track) for XiaoIce Band: A Melody and Arrangement Generation Framework for Pop Music; while Best Student Paper in the ADS Track went to ActiveRemediation: The Search for Lead Pipes in Flint, Michigan by Jacob Abernethy, Alex Chojnacki, Arya Farahi, Eric Schwartz, and Jared Webb