Best Paper Awards in Computer Science in the Past 25 Years (1996-2020)

CHI has a lot of subcategories, each subcategory has a best paper award!

They used to have far fewer. But over time, CHI began to include more disciplines, especially the social sciences, evaluated papers with different value systems. The technical HCI people didn't use the same values as the social scientists, for instance. Rather than try to settle a war of values, they simply increased the number of papers that were accepted, and also increased the number of best paper awards.

More fundamentally, evaluating HCI research is very subjective. That means it's harder for a diverse audience to even agree on what constitutes good HCI research. Many HCI researchers have grown frustrated with the value of their research being discarded or overlooked by review committees. As a result, they tend to favor lowering the bar to entry, and accepting more papers, thinking that it's better to have false positives than false negatives.

I think it's the biggest academic computer science conference now with a lot of different communities and subcommittees. Every subcommittee could be considered as an individual conference ...

There is a race to the bottom happening with awards: If a community gives more awards at their conferences, their people look more impressive to grant givers and promotion comitties. Then the community grows and can hold more and bigger conferences with more prices.

Prices are alright for identifying interesting talks at a conference, but you shouldn't compare them between fields.

Great suggestions. I've opted to include more broad umbrella conferences, than more narrow ones. So S&P, SIGMOD, and VLDB represent security and databases. This is because it already takes about 40 hours of work each year to update, normalize, and regenerate the page.