BCS Lovelace Medal

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.

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.

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.

Nominations are accepted from anyone, anywhere in the world but it is expected that nominees are academic, industry or education professionals who have a direct connection with the UK. Nominators and nominees do not need to be BCS members.

Nominees will have had major, notable impact in their field, and be widely recognised for their excellence as well as their wider contribution to the computing community.

They will have furthered knowledge or public understanding, or driven a transformational change in their discipline. They may have made a breakthrough, opened a new area of research, or advanced the efficacy or availability of computing education, including through public policy.

There are no career stage restrictions or expectations with this prize, the emphasis is on impact.

Selection of the Lovelace Medal winners is made by a Lovelace Medal Selection Panel appointed each year by the BCS Academy of Computing Board.

The Selection Panel will base their evaluations on the overall quality of relevant contributions and achievements by nominees, in relation to the selection criteria outlined below.

Research:

• originality, significance and impact of research, innovation.
• quality of publications and/or patents and/or software.
• collaborations and teamwork, supporting the development of colleagues and encouraging wider collaboration.
• consideration of ethical and societal implications within their research and its direction.
• professional standing.

Education:

• quality of contributions to and impact on availability and quality of educational provision.
• raising the profile and reach of computing in the curriculum, within and across departments and disciplines.
• scale and quality of computing talent that has been inspired, nurtured and developed through their efforts.
• championing and advancing inclusion and diversity in computing education.
• supporting the development of colleagues and encouraging wider collaboration.

2024 Selection Panels

Lovelace Research

• Professor Anthony G Cohn FREng FLSW CEng CITP FAAAI FEurAI FAISB FAAIA FAIIA FIET FBCS University of Leeds (Chair)
• Julia Adamson MBE CITP FBCS, Managing Director, BCS Education & Public Benefit
• Czarina Barnsby FBCS, 6point6
• Professor Tom Crick MBE FLSW FAcSS FBCS
• Professor Jane Hilston MBE CITP FBCS FRSE, University of Edinburgh
• Professor Nick Jennings FREng CITP CEng FBCS, Loughborough University
• Professor Marta Kwiatkowska FBCS, University of Oxford

Lovelace Education

• Professor Tom Crick MBE FLSW FAcSS FBCS, Swansea University & DCMS (Chair)
• Julia Adamson MBE CITP FBCS, Managing Director, BCS Education & Public Benefit
• Claire Arbery, Weston College
• Professor Anthony G Cohn FREng, FLSW, CEng, CITP, FAAAI, FEurAI, FAISB, FAAIA, FAIIA, FIET, FBCS, University of Leeds
• Pete Dring, Fulford School
• Professor Alan Hayes CITP FBCS, University of Bath
• Dr Fiona McNeill FBCS, University of Edinburgh

Nominations should be written for a general computing audience and submitted online.

Entries need to include the following:

• full name and contact details for both nominator and nominee
• a short citation to briefly describe what the nominee should be awarded for
• Concise information on the nominee’s contributions, impact and exceptionality
• Link to a biography or LinkedIn profile of the nominee
• Name and email address of someone who will endorse your nomination.

Endorsers will be asked to confirm their endorsement and provide a short statement of support.

All nominators and endorsers are asked to confirm that to the best of their knowledge there is no impediment, relating to professional conduct, to their nominee receiving this prize.

2023

Tom Crick – for contributions to computer science education across research, policy and practice.

Demis Hassabis – for extraordinary contribution to artificial intelligence and to the UK technology industry.

Jane Hillston – for work developing new approaches to modelling both artificial and natural systems by combining elements of formal languages with mathematical modelling.

Read more

2020

Ian Horrocks – for significant contributions to the advancements of reasoning systems. Read more

Nick Jennings and Michael Wooldridge – for contributions to multi-agent systems. Read more

2019

Marta Kwiatkowska – for probabilistic model checking for the data-rich world. Read more

2018

Gordon Plotkin – for contributions to semantic framework for programming languages. Read more

2017

Georg Gottlob – for contributions to the logical and theoretical foundations of databases. Read more

2016

Andrew Blake – for contributions to the understanding and advancement of computing as a discipline.

2015

Ross Anderson – for contributions to building security engineering into a discipline. Read more

2014

Steve Furber – for designing the ARM microprocessor architecture and contributions to computer systems. Find out more

2013

Samson Abramsky – for contributions to domain theory, game semantics and categorical quantum mechanics

2012

Grady Booch – for contributions to software architecture, software engineering and collaborative environments. Read more

2011

Hermann Hauser– for entrepreneurship and for co-developing the BBC Micro Computer.

2010

John C. Reynolds – for contributions to logical foundations of programs and programming languages.

2009

Yorick Wilks – for contributions to meaning-based understanding of natural language

2008

Tony Storey – for contributions to Autonomic Computing

2007

Karen Spärck Jones – for contributions to natural language processing. Read more

2006

Sir Tim Berners-Lee – for inventing the World Wide Web.

2005

Nick McKeown – for contributions to router hardware design.

2004

John Warnock of Adobe Systems – for contributions in document processing.

2002

Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman – for contributions to grid computing.

2001

Douglas C. Engelbart – for inventing the computer mouse.

2000

Linus Torvalds – for creating the Linux kernel operating system. Read more

1998

Michael A. Jackson and Chris Burton – for program design and structured programming.