Important to note is that this is a rather limited list of conferences, so the resulting list of most influential universities/companies doesn't really say anything about their total output. For example, software engineering conferences are completely lacking (ICSE/ASE/FSE/etc.) as well as programming languages (POPL/PLDI/etc.)
<i>Credit is given in decreasing author order as customary.</i><p>I think customary is quite variable. I would put weight on the first author and maybe last, but beyond that the order is usually meaningless. Some groups where I am will even go with alphabetical order and flip a coin to reverse it.
What's remarkable about (non-retrospective) "best paper" awards is how poorly they stand up to time. It would be very interesting to add citation counts to get a crude indication of how good people are at identifying significant (or even just popular) work in their fields.
Also see <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-academic-papers-in-computer-science" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-academic-papers-in-co...</a>