The Lovelace Medal was established by

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in ...

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 Tom Crick (born January 1981) is a British interdisciplinary computer scientist. He is Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and Professor of Digital Policy at Swansea University. Alongside hi ...

– 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 Ian Robert Horrocks One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research ...

– 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 Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska (born 1957) is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fell ...

– 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 Georg Gottlob FRS is an Austrian-Italian computer scientist who works in the areas of database theory, logic, and artificial intelligence and is Professor of Informatics at the University of Calabria. He was Professor at the University of Oxford ...

– 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 Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is a Senior Fellow at Intel, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He has also started technology co ...

– 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 ...

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

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

Medal recipients

See also

References

External links