Dr Sue Sentance, Director of Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge; Professor Aggelos Kiayias Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh; and Professor Philippa Gardner FREng, Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Imperial College London are the recipients of the prestigious computing award - BCS Lovelace Medal 2024.
The Lovelace Medal is presented annually by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT for outstanding contributions to the advancement of computing. Previous winners include worldwide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and information retrieval pioneer Karen Spärck Jones and recent Nobel Prize winner Sir Demis Hassabis.
This year, Professor Kiayias and Professor Gardner each have been announced as winners of the Lovelace Research Medal while the Lovelace Education Medal has been awarded to Dr Sue Sentance. The three will be awarded their Medals later this year.
Recipients are truly deserving
Julia Adamson MBE, BCS’ Managing Director for Education and Public Benefit, said: “All three recipients of this year’s BCS Lovelace Medal are truly deserving, having significantly advanced the global reputation of computing as a force for good. Their work spans crucial areas such as computing education, cybersecurity, and software languages, each contributing meaningfully to society through information technology. We are proud to honour their achievements at a time when computing is more vital than ever to our daily lives. Their profound impact on the IT industry and their diverse accomplishments make them worthy of this prestigious award.”
Dr Sue Sentance is an experienced educator, research and leader in computing education and is Director of Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. She is awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition for her exceptional contributions and research in computing education, in particular, her PRIMM approach to teaching programming, which has been adopted by teachers globally. In addition, Dr Sentance played a leading role in establishing the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE), was an active member of the Computing at School (CAS) board and BCS’s School Curriculum and Assessment Committee (now the Schools and Colleges Committee), and currently chairs BCS’s Schools and Colleges Committee.
Dr Sentance said, “It is increasingly accepted that all young people need access to computing education to thrive in a world shaped by digital technologies, including AI, data science, and cybersecurity. Working in this field is a privilege—I have learned so much from the students, teachers, researchers, and stakeholders I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with over the years. I am deeply honoured to have been awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal for Education, and I am grateful for this recognition of the critical importance of computing education for young people."
Deeply honoured
Professor Aggelos Kiayias is Director of Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition of his transformative contributions to the theory and practice of cyber security and cryptography, with his work leading to new blockchain protocols that address the issues of energy efficiency, interoperability and privacy.
Professor Kiayias said, “It is a special honour to receive the BCS Lovelace Medal. I am grateful to BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT for recognising my work and for highlighting Cyber Security and Cryptography, two areas of computer science that are of pressing importance, especially now when information technology services scale globally and so much depends on their resilience. I want to also express my gratitude to my students and colleagues whose collaboration over the years has been invaluable.”
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Professor Philippa Gardner is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Imperial College London. She is awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition of her contributions to mechanised language specification and scalable software verification and true bug detection, including her development of a mechanised specification of the WebAssembly standard, a multi-language platform for creating tools for analysing industrial code written in, for example, JavaScript and C, and program logics for analysing complex concurrent algorithms.
Professor Gardner said, "I am deeply honoured to be awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal and to see the value of my work on formal software specification, verification and bug detection recognised in this way. I was extremely fortunate to be mentored by special people in the early stages of my career: Walter Ledermann, my supervisors Gordon Plotkin and John Power, and Robin Milner. Over the years I have been privileged to work with many collaborators in the UK and internationally. I’d like to thank them all for their support and contributions.”
About The Lovelace Medal
The BCS Lovelace Medal was established in 1998 in honour of Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron. Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.
The Lovelace Medal recognises people whose work in the areas of research and education have contributed to significant advances in computing. Winners are chosen by an annual panel selected by BCS Academy of Computing Board. The panel considers factors such as the originality, impact, and ethical implications in their work.
More about Sue Sentance
Sue Sentance is the Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, where she leads a team dedicated to advancing research that improves the quality and accessibility of computing education for young people. In her role as Chief Learning Officer at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, she played a pivotal role in the Department for Education (DfE)-funded National Centre for Computing Education, and also led the Gender Balance in Computing research programme. Known internationally for her contributions to programming pedagogy, physical computing, and curriculum reform, Sue developed the PRIMM approach to teaching programming, now widely adopted by educators around the world. She serves as Chair of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT’s Schools and Colleges Committee and has been actively involved with Computing At School (CAS) for over 15 years, contributing to the transformation of computing education in the UK.
More about Aggelos Kiayias
Professor Aggelos Kiayias is chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the chief scientist of blockchain infrastructure research and engineering company Input Output. Over the years, he has made significant advances in blockchain technology and distributed systems, cryptography, e-voting and secure multiparty protocols as well as privacy-enhanced identity management. His contributions include the analysis of the bitcoin blockchain protocol, the Ouroboros proof of stake protocol, the design, analysis and deployment of verifiable e-voting systems, the development of new threat models for digital content distribution systems, as well as the security analysis and attack mitigation in the context of web applications. His contributions improved the cyber security and availability of systems used by many millions of users and lead to the development of novel systems that enable people to interact and transfer value safely over the Internet.
More about Philippa Gardner
Professor Philippa Gardner is a professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, having previously been at Edinburgh and Cambridge. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020. She has brought scientific and mathematical method to the specification and analysis of large-scale open software systems. She has developed trustworthy mechanisations of language standards, which led to the correction of definitions and formal proofs of properties within the W3C WebAssembly formal specification. Her work includes compositional analysis techniques and well-engineered tools for both semi-automatic verification and automatic detection of true bugs in industrial and open-source software. She has also created program logics for verifying complex concurrent algorithms, resulting in tools now used by hundreds of specialist users. Her contributions represent over three decades of sustained investment, all focussed on achieving machine-proven guarantees about the safety and correctness of real, deployed software, grounded in mathematical foundations.
Gardner was the founding director of the UK Research Institute in Verified Trustworthy Software Systems (VeTSS) from 2017 to 2023, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Cyber Security Centre. The purpose of VeTSS is to bring together academics, industry professionals, regulators and government representatives, unified by a common interest in software specification, verification and testing. Gardner also chaired the second Programming Language Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) at the Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) 2013, promoting diversity and early-career researchers, having been an invited speaker at the first PLMW, also at POPL. PLMW is now regularly held with the top ACM SIGPLAN conferences.
