The Royal Society Milner Award, formally the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, is awarded annually by the
Royal Society
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
, a London-based
learned society
A learned society ( ; also scholarly, intellectual, or academic society) is an organization that exists to promote an academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and sciences. Membership may be open to al ...
, for "outstanding achievement in
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...
by a European researcher". The award is supported by
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
and is named in honour of
Robin Milner
Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010) was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.LCF and the programming language ML.
Recipients should be active researchers in computer science who are either European or have resided in Europe for at least 12 months prior to their nomination. Winners receive a bronze medal and a personal prize of £5,000 and are invited to deliver a public lecture on their research at the Society. The Council of the Royal Society chooses recipients on the recommendation of the Milner Award Committee. The committee is made up of
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...
, Members of the
Académie des sciences
The French Academy of Sciences (, ) is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French Scientific method, scientific research. It was at the forefron ...
(France), and Members of Leopoldina (Germany).
Preceding the Milner Award was the
Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award
The Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award was an annual award given by the Royal Society and the Académie des sciences to scientists working in Europe who had made a major contribution to the advancement of science through the u ...
, which rewarded scientists in Europe for advancements in science using computational methods. It lasted from 2006 to 2009 until it was replaced by the current award. The
ACM SIGPLAN
SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on programming languages. This SIG explores programming language concepts and tools, focusing on design, implementation, practice, and theory. Its members are progra ...
Robin Milner Young Researcher Award is a similar award rewarded for "outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages".
Recipients
The inaugural winner
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 ...
received his prize in 2012 but delivered his public lecture in 2013, the same year as
Serge Abiteboul
Serge Joseph Abiteboul (born 25 August 1953 in Paris, France) is a French computer scientist working in the areas of data management, database theory, and finite model theory. Education
The son of two hardware store owners, Abiteboul attended hig ...
. In 2018,
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 ...
became the first female recipient of the award. Although the 2019 recipient
Eugene Myers
Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis.
Education
Myers recei ...
is American, he moved to
Dresden
Dresden (; ; Upper Saxon German, Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; , ) is the capital city of the States of Germany, German state of Saxony and its second most populous city after Leipzig. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, 12th most p ...
, Germany, in 2012 to become a director of the
Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics
__NOTOC__
The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) is a biology research institute located in Dresden, Germany. It was founded in 1998 and was fully operational in 2001. Research groups in the institute work in m ...
, thus meeting the criteria for a researcher who is European or has lived in Europe for at least 12 months. Due to infection control measures taken because of the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
, the 2020 lecture was held as a
Zoom
Zoom may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media Film
* ''Zoom'' (2006 film), starring Tim Allen
* ''Zoom'' (2015 film), a Canada-Brazil film by Pedro Morelli
* ''Zoom'' (2016 Kannada film), a Kannada film
* ''Zoom'' (2016 Sinhala film), a Sr ...
webinar
Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conference, conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of ...
.
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 ...