In the annual international conference, only 20% of the submitted research papers are selected for presentation. Along with Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) conferences, ACM SIGMOD is one of the most renowned international conferences on data base. This year marked its 39th year, and ACM SIGMOD received a total of 372 research papers, 76 of which were selected for publication and only one of which received the Best Paper Award. It was the first time that a researcher from Korea won the Best Paper Award in this competition.

Professor Chung’s research, titled “Massive Graph Triangulation,” studies algorithms for settling triangle listing problems. The objective of triangle listing is to find all the possible triangles in an undirected large graph. This finding is expected to be useful in understanding structures expressed as massive graphs, such as social networks.

“Due to the rapid development in the field of computer science, new research is deemed most important in assessing the performance of universities, professors, and their research,” said Professor Chung. “So the results from international competitions hold more importance than the research results from Science Citation Index (SCI) journals.” He also added that researchers in Korea must understand the importance of such international competitions for the field of computer science.

Professor Chung presented his first thesis at ACM SIGMOD in 1999, a first from Korea, and this year’s research is his seventh.