Each year the steering committee of the Pacific Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) presents an award for The Most Influential Paper. The candidates for the Most Influential Paper Award are those papers published at this conference ten years prior to the current conference. The award recognizes a paper that has had significant influence over the past decade. Google Scholar is used to identify a candidate pool of papers. These papers are then reviewed by the awards committee to consider the quality of citations. An important criterion is that the paper should present novel and big ideas which change our way of thinking. A challenger/champion approach is used by the awards committee to identify the most influential paper.