24 March 2009

A pioneering AI scientist helping develop virtual agents to keep older people company and an academic who has broken new ground on programme termination have been named as winners of this year's Lovelace medal and Roger Needham award, respectively. The awards to Professor Yorick Wilks and Dr Byron Cook by the BCS are in recognition of their significant contributions to the development of IT.

Prof. Wilks has been working in engineering research, in particular AI and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, for almost half a century. Currently Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sheffield University and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Internet Institute, he pioneered meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers, while his work on preference semantics during the 1970s laid the foundations of what has now become known as word sense disambiguation.

He has published a number of definitive books in the field. Prof Wilks is presently co-ordinator of the EU-funded Companions project which is developing virtual agents to help people, particularly the elderly, with access to information, services and company.

Commenting on Prof Wilks' Lovelace medal, David Clarke, BCS chief executive, says: "I am delighted the BCS is able to recognise the outstanding and sustained contribution Professor Wilks has made during his career to the subject of AI through such a prestigious award. The increasing complexity of the web will have a profound impact on the way everyone, including the elderly, will live in the future and his work will have a lasting impact on society."

The Roger Needham Award is presented to Dr Byron Cook, who created the first practical tool for automatically proving termination of real-world programmes. His software tool, called TERMINATOR, caused a major stir in the program verification research community when it appeared because it extended Alan Turing's statement on the halting of programmes. It has rapidly spilled beyond research circles to the point where TERMINATOR is to be productized by the Windows kernel team.

Based on this work, Dr Cook has delivered numerous high-profile keynote talks at major research conferences, and his work has been the subject of considerable press coverage, including Scientific American and Vogue magazine. He is a researcher at Microsoft's research laboratory at Cambridge University and full professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.

Dr Andrew Herbert, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge says: "Dr Byron Cook's work is highly deserving of this accolade; he has successfully tackled a 70 year old conundrum postulated by the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, As a result of Byron's work, termination bugs in mainstream software are set to become a thing of the past, enhancing both the personal computing experience and helping business IT systems to run more smoothly and avoid downtime."

Lovelace Medal
Roger Needham Award

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