The Lovelace Medal was established by
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing.
It is the top award in computing in the UK.
Awardees deliver the Lovelace Lecture.
The award is named after Countess
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-pur ...
, an English mathematician, scientist, and writer. Lovelace was the daughter of
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest poets of the United Kingdom. Among his best-kno ...
. She worked with computer pioneer
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered ...
on the proposed mechanical general-purpose computer – the
Analytical Engine,
in 1842 and is often described as the world's first
computer programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming.
The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...
.
The medal is intended to be presented to individuals, without regard to their countries of domicile, provided a direct connection to the UK. It is generally anticipated that there will be one medalist each year, but the regulation does not preclude either several medalists or no medalist.
Medal recipients
Awardees include:
*2024
Sue Sentance – for her exceptional contributions and research in computing education.
*2024
Philippa Gardner – for her contributions to mechanised language specification and scalable
software verification Software verification is a discipline of software engineering, programming languages, and theory of computation whose goal is to assure that software satisfies the expected requirements.
Broad scope and classification
A broad definition of verif ...
and true bug detection.
*2024
Aggelos Kiayias – for his transformative contributions to the theory and practice of cyber security and cryptography.
*2023
Tom Crick – for contributions to
computer science education
Computer science education or computing education is the field of teacher, teaching and learning the discipline of computer science, and computational thinking. The field of computer science education encompasses a wide range of topics, from b ...
across research, policy and practice.
*2023
Demis Hassabis
Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Ha ...
– for research in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to artificial intelligence and to the UK technology industry.
* 2023
Jane Hillston – for research in recognition of her work developing new approaches to modelling both artificial and natural systems by combining elements of formal languages with mathematical modelling.
*2020
Ian Horrocks – for significant contributions to the advancements of
reasoning systems
*2020
Nick Jennings and
Michael Wooldridge – for contributions to
multi-agent systems
A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.H. Pan; M. Zahmatkesh; F. Rekabi-Bana; F. Arvin; J. HuT-STAR: Time-Optimal Swarm Trajectory Planning for Quadroto ...
*2019
Marta Kwiatkowska – for probabilistic model checking for the data-rich world
*2018
Gordon Plotkin
Gordon David Plotkin (born 9 September 1946) is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and his ...
– for contributions to semantic framework for programming languages
*2017
Georg Gottlob – for contributions to the logical and theoretical foundations of databases
*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
*2014
Steve Furber
Stephen Byram Furber (born 21 March 1953) is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, and Emeritus ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. Afte ...
– for designing the ARM microprocessor architecture and contributions to computer systems
*2013
Samson Abramsky
Samson Abramsky (born 12 March 1953) is a British computer scientist who is a Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2000 t ...
– for contributions to domain theory, game semantics and categorical quantum mechanics
*2012
Grady Booch
Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software archit ...
– for contributions to software architecture, software engineering and collaborative environments
*2011
Hermann Hauser
Hermann Maria Hauser (born 1948) is an Austrian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and inventor who is primarily associated with the Cambridge technology community in England.
Education and early life
When Hauser was 16 he went to the United K ...
– for entrepreneurship and for co-developing the BBC Micro Computer
*2010
John C. Reynolds
John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist.
Education and affiliations
John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in theoretical physics from Harvard U ...
– 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
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that unde ...
– for contributions to natural language processing
*2006
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow ...
– for inventing the World Wide Web
*2005
Nick McKeown – for contributions to router hardware design
*2004
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock (October 6, 1940 – August 19, 2023) was an American computer scientist, inventor, technology businessman, and philanthropist best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, wit ...
of
Adobe Systems
Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American software, computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to ...
– for contributions in document processing
*2002
Ian Foster and
Carl Kesselman – for contributions to
grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished fro ...
*2001
Douglas C. Engelbart – for inventing the computer mouse
*2000
Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git.
He was honored, along with Shinya Yam ...
– for creating the
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...
operating system
*1998
Michael A. Jackson and
Chris Burton – for program design and structured programming
See also
*
List of computer science awards
This list of computer science awards is an index to articles on notable awards related to computer science. It includes lists of awards by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, other comput ...
*
Ada Lovelace Award
References
External links
* {{official, url=https://www.bcs.org/events/awards-and-competitions/lovelace-medal/
1998 establishments in the United Kingdom
Awards established in 1998
Computer science awards
British science and technology awards
British Computer Society
Ada Lovelace