Department of Computer Science and Technology - Awards and honours

• Celebrating at our Hall of Fame Awards
  

  A world-leading British semiconductor company; a project investigating how robots could help boost our mental wellbeing; an email app so fast it promises to give users four hours back a week; and leading research into deterministic parsing. These are the winners of our annual Hall of Fame Awards, which were presented on Thursday 18 April in a ceremony at Queens' College.

  Company of the Year: Arm

  Company of the Year went to Arm, a global company, with 43 offices in 21 countries and more than 6,000 employees worldwide, including nearly 3,000 in the UK with its global headquarters in Cambridge. Born here in 1990 with the goal of designing a computer intended to run on a battery. Its success since then in designing, architecting, developing and licensing high-performance, low-cost and energy-efficient CPUs — the 'brain' of all computers and many household and electronic devices — helped fuel the smartphone revolution and has made Arm a household name. Its worth was recognised in autumn 2023 when it was floated on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in an offering that valued it at $54 billion.

  Arm has long had a research relationship with the Department. Most notably, this has led to the development of a potentially game-changing new cybersecurity technology, focusing on new ways to design the architecture of a computer’s central processing unit to make software less vulnerable to security breaches. The technology, CHERI, extends conventional architectures and software stacks with novel hardware support for memory protection and secure encapsulation. Since early 2022, an industrial demonstrator of the technology has been made available to UK companies for testing through the UK government’s £200 million Digital Security by Design programme. 

  Above: MPAM Lead Architect Matteo Andreozzi and Research Ecosystem Director Andrea Kells received the Company of the Year Award on behalf of Arm from Head of Department Prof Alastair Beresford.

   

  Publication of the Year: flap: A Deterministic Parser with Fused Lexing

  After a Department-wide selection process that saw almost 50 papers submitted and considered, Publication of the Year was awarded to Jeremy Yallop, Ningning Xie and Neel Krishnaswami for their paper flap: A Deterministic Parser with Fused Lexing.  

  Left: Prof Jeremy Yallop receives the Publication of the Year award from Alastair Beresford.

   

  Product of the Year: Superhuman 

  Product of the Year was awarded to super-fast email app Superhuman, founded by Rahul Vohra in in 2014. Targeted at users who want to improve their productivity, it features liberal use of keyboard shortcuts to speed up email reading and replying. Superhuman has raised over $100 million from venture capitalists. Initially, the app only integrated with Gmail, but in May 2022 it launched integration with Microsoft Outlook. In February this year, Superhuman announced AI-powered drafts for instant replies.

   

  Better Future Award: Robotic Mental Wellbeing Coaches

  The Better Future Award went to researchers Micol Spitale, Minja Axelsson and Hatice Gunes for 'Robotic Mental Wellbeing Coaches for the Workplace: An In-the-Wild Study on Form'.

  In Prof Gunes's Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) Lab here, researchers are exploring how social robots can be used to help support our mental wellbeing. In this study, they wanted to find out if robotic wellbeing coaches could be used in the real world to help employers protect and promote good mental health in the workplace. So in the first study of its type, they took two robots - one resembling a child, the other a more toy-like robot - to local tech firm Cambridge Consultants. There, 26 employees took part in weekly wellbeing sessions led by the robots. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions and scripts for the sessions, the researchers found that the physical appearance of the robot affected how participants interacted with it.

  This study offered valuable insights for the design and deployment of robot wellbeing coaches. It also showed that robots can be a useful tool to promote mental wellbeing in the workplace and could help employers overcome resource barriers to promoting good mental health practices to their staff.

  Prof Hatice Gunes and Dr Micol Spitale received the Better Future Award.

  Congratulations to all our winners!

   

   

• Students' Group Design Projects enjoy success
  

  Our second-year undergraduates exhibited their Group Design Projects this week. And their success in addressing the challenges they were set impressed the external companies and clients they were working for.

  Three teams took home awards this year for their work on developing a clearer way to notate music, improving supply chain resilience, and sourcing second hand electronic components.

  The Group Design Projects are an annual challenge for second-year students. Working in teams of six or seven, they have to meet a brief set by an external client. As ever, this year's projects spanned a wide spectrum. 

  Videos of all the students' projects will be shown at our Department Open Day on Saturday 16 March as part of the Cambridge Festival.

  Team Bravo were charged with creating a tool that could offer predictive text suggestions to users of Braille keyboards; team Oscar were tasked with using AI techniques to analyse aerial images of growing crops to see if they are taking up enough soil nitrogen.

  Team Whisky were developing the infrastructure for a searchable globe that users could interact with to learn about local people's lives and communities; team Lima were designing an app to help people with memory loss trigger and record stories from their long-term memories.

  The project clients and members of the Department came to see an exhibition of all the students' work yesterday, and they - and the students themselves - voted for projects they felt had done best. There were three winners in all.

  Most Impressive Technical Achievement - team Mike
  The award went to team Mike for their project on 'Optimising Music Notation'. Students Albert, Claire, Dron, Sky, Sam and Jack worked with a member of the University's Department of Music on an alternative style for notating music that has been found to improve performance. Their task was to define a specification language for this modified style and a pipeline for rendering it.  The runners-up were teams Delta and November.

  Most impressive Professional Achievement - team Quebec
  The award went to team Quebec (Andrei, Hannah, Jing, LT, Kevin and Sol) for their project on 'Supply Chain Resilience' to enhance the efficiency and resilience of global supply chains, which have been affected by events such as the Covid pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine. The students had to create a map that showed users visually ways of improving routes for delivering products and allowed them to compare and contrast CO2 emissions, cost, reliability and robustness. The runners-up for this award were teams Delta and Tango.

  The Contribution to a Better Future Award - team Delta
  This award went to Team Delta (Christos, Lucy, Matej, Kang, Safal and Liam) for their project 'Component Quest', which addressed chip shortages, rising costs and increasing levels of e-waste in the electronics industry. The students' challenge was to develop a smartphone app that uses AI to identify and value second hand electronic components, provide a current market value and link users to a marketplace where they can buy and sell them. Runners-up were teams Delta and Hotel.

  Many congratulations to all our students!

• Mobile health-monitoring device wins ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant
  

  Many congratulations to Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems here, who has won an ERC Proof of Concept grant 2023.

  She will be using the funding to further her work on developing mobile devices – like commercially-available earbuds – that can accurately pick up wearers' body sounds and monitor them for health purposes. 

  The European Research Council Proof of Concept grants – worth €150,000 – help researchers bridge the gap between the discoveries stemming from their frontier research and the practical application of the findings, including early phases of their commercialisation.

  Cecilia is one of 66 researchers who have been granted this funding to unlock the commercial and societal potential of their research. This funding is part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe.

  Mobile systems and machine learning for health
  Cecilia’s research interests are in mobile systems and machine learning for health. Her existing ERC-funded Project EAR was the first to demonstrate that the existing microphones in earbuds can be used to pick up wearers' levels of activity and heart rate and to trace it accurately even when the wearer is exercising vigorously.

  Cecilia now wants to build on this work by enhancing the robustness of these in-ear microphones and further improve their performance in monitoring human activity and physiology in 'real life' conditions, including by developing new algorithms to help the devices analyse the data they are collecting.

  "There are currently no solutions on the market that use audio devices to detect body function signals like this," she says, "and they could play an extremely valuable role in health monitoring.

  "Because the devices' hardware, computing needs and energy consumption are inexpensive, they could put body function monitoring into the hands of the world's population accurately and affordably."

• Researcher receives 'Test of Time' Award for her work on data stream processing

  The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)  – the world's largest association of computing professionals  – has honoured a researcher here for her work on the efficient use of cloud resources for data stream processing.

  Eva Kalyvianaki – an Associate Professor here – was co-author in 2013 of Integrating scale out and fault tolerance in stream processing using operator state management, a pioneering paper in the field.

  Ten years on, it has received the Test of Time Award 2023 from SIGMOD, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on the Management of Data.

  This award recognizes the conference paper from 10 years previously that has had the most impact over the intervening decade on research, products and methodology.

  The paper – co-authored by Eva when she was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London with her then colleagues Raul Castro Fernandez (the first author), Matteo Migliavacca and Peter Pietzuch – addressed challenges in scaling data stream processing systems to large numbers of cloud-hosted machines.

  At the time, data processing was moving from being the analysis of online data streams on a single machine to the online processing on virtual machines of a stream of real-time data.

  With data increasing in both size and speed, new kinds of data stream processing systems were being designed to scale out to machines hosted in the cloud. But though the cloud offers infinite resources, in theory, there are also challenges, with failures among virtual machines being a common problem.  

  So the paper's authors set out to address the issue of how to scale out real time data processing to dozens of virtual machines on demand in a way that was both efficient and robust to machine failures. 

  "This was relatively easy to do for data processing where the operator states are well-known, but much harder where they are arbitrary," Eva says.

  "So we defined state as a first class citizen, treating it the same way as any other kind of data structure, as an entity that could be copied and migrated from one machine to another.

  "Once we had that, we defined APIs on the state, and then we could use the same APIs to deal with scalability and fault tolerance, meaning you could do well-defined operations over the state and the APIs would copy, checkpoint, split and merge it."

  The innovative techniques they developed in managing operator state in stream processing systems enabled seamless scalability and robust fault tolerance and performed better than existing systems at the time. And their work informed the design of subsequent, state-of-the-art industrial data processing systems.

  Using research to inform teaching
  Ten years on, the paper has another use – as a teaching aid in a course here for third-year undergraduates on the fundamentals of cloud computing. The course includes a lecture on the use of the cloud in analysing online real-time data streams.

  "I want our students to gain the confidence to address problems and arrive at the solution by themselves," Eva says. "Because I was part of this research, I can tell them what we did behind the scenes to get to our solution – including what worked and what didn't work. I hope that helps them work out the steps and processes they need to go through to get to the answer."

   

• Award for advancing the sensing capabilities of in-ear devices
  

  A researcher into the use of wearable devices for health monitoring has just won the 2023 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Runner-up Award.

  Dr Andrea Ferlini - who completed his PhD here with Professor Cecilia Mascolo - was announced as the sole runner-up for this year's Dissertation Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest association of computing professionals. He received the award for his dissertation 'For advancing the state of art of sensing in ear-worn devices'.

  Andrea, pictured above centre, is the only researcher outside the USA to have won this award.

  The SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation award is given annually to recognise excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of mobile computing and wireless networks. Every year, one winner and up to two runners-up are recognised by the Special Interest Group for their work in this area.

  Andrea, who is now a Research Scientist with Nokia Bell Labs, works in the area of sensing in wearable devices that can be used for health monitoring.

  Using in-ear devices for health monitoring
  This Department and Nokia Bell Labs have been working in collaboration on the development of what are called 'earables' - ear-worn devices like wireless earbuds. 

  Nokia Bell Labs developed a new platform for earable technologies, and the University of Cambridge is one of a number of universities working on it. Researchers here are focusing on how to process and understand the information coming out of the earables and how to make mobile computing systems more efficient and secure.

  In his doctoral research Andrea was attempting to solve a long-standing, hard problem of motion estimation using only the sensors found in earables.   

  His PhD supervisor, Professor Cecilia Mascolo, says Andrea's doctoral research has helped advance our understanding of the capabilities and limitations of a range of sensors in earables, including accelerometers, magnetometers and in-ear microphones.

  "The contributions within his dissertation were really innovative and two of the chapters have already been published at top-tier SIGMOBILE conferences, namely MobiSys and Mobicom," she says. 

  "An impressive achievement"
  Professor Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Chair of the ACM SIGMOBILE Dissertation Award Committee, said the committee had been "impressed with the new custom hardware to extend the sensing capability of such devices".

  He added: "We received many strong nominations this year, but Andrea's work stood out in its depth and strength of contributions. Congratulations to him on this impressive achievement!"

  Andrea says that he feels "honored and humbled" to have his worked recognised in this way. He adds: "I hope this will be the cornerstone of my future research and career, and I really want to thank Cecilia, my supervisor, who advised me and kindly steered me when needed since the first day we met."

  Well done Andrea. And congratulations also to Dissertation Award Winner Jinxian Wang, who was chosen for his doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University, 'For advancing the science and interdisciplinary applications of wireless energy transfer'.

• ACM Programming Languages Software Award goes to OCaml researchers
  

  The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest association of computing professionals, today gave the 2023 SIGPLAN Award to a group of developers for their work on the functional programming language OCaml.

  The award was presented at the annual SIGPLAN Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference to a group of researchers and developers including our colleague Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing here.

  The prestigious Programming Languages Software Award is given annually "to an institution or individual(s) to recognise the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools," ACM says.

  They add: "The impact may be reflected in the widespread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the wider programming language community either in research projects, in the open-source community, or commercially." 

  Anil is the founder of the OCaml Labs project, which ran here from 2012-2021 with the aim of bringing the functional programming language OCaml out of obscurity and encourage its use in industry.

  It has been successful in that aim with OCaml today playing an increasingly important role in industrial applications because of its high levels of reliability and precision: it is the language of choice for building major verification tools (Coq, Why3, AltErgo, Imandra) and industrial users of it include Jane Street, Microsoft and Facebook.

  OCaml is also used extensively in undergraduate teaching here in the Department and is the first functional programming language that undergraduates learn.

  Among the other named developers receiving today's award are several alumni of this Department. They are:

  • David Allsopp (who was an undergraduate here, a Research Assistant in OCaml Labs, and is now a software engineer at Tarides) 
  • Nicolás Ojeda Bär (a former maths postdoc in Cambridge who is now a software engineer at Lexifi)
  • Stephen Dolan (who completed his PhD here under the supervision of Prof Alan Mycroft, was a Research Assistant in OCaml Labs, and is now a software engineer at Jane Street)
  • KC Sivaramakrishnan (a former Senior Research Assistant in OCaml Labs and is now CTO at Tarides)
  • Leo White (who completed his PhD here with Prof Alan Mycroft, is a former Research Assistant in OCaml Labs, and is now a software engineer at Jane Street)

  Congratulations to all of them on receiving this award.

  There have been three spin-out companies from this Department that use OCaml, including Tarides. "The XenServer toolstack still uses OCaml 20 years on," Anil Madhavapeddy says. "And Docker for Desktop (which spun out of this Department as Unikernel Systems) uses OCaml code in millions of desktops via https://github.com/moby/vpnkit ."

  It is not the first award for Departmental research into OCaml. In 2020, the OCaml Labs team received a Distinguished Paper award from the International Conference on Functional Programming 2020 for their paper, 'Retrofitting Parallelism onto OCaml'. 

  The award honoured their work in solving the challenging issue of adding parallelism to this widely-used functional programming language with millions of lines of existing code, while also maintaining backwards compatibility.

  You can read about that award here.

• Professorial promotions for six of our colleagues
  

  Pictured above, from left to right: Alice Hutchings, Neel Krishnaswami, Cengiz Oztireli, Hatice Gunes, Rafal Mantiuk and Rob Mullins.

  Congratulations to the six members of this Department who have been promoted as Professor!

  The University runs a rigorous and competitive Senior Academic Promotion process. We are delighted that in the 2022-23 process, six of our colleagues have been promoted. 

  Dr Alice Hutchings has been promoted from Associate Professor to Professor. Alice is part of the Security Research Group here. She is also Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, an interdisciplinary initiative combining expertise from computer science, criminology, and law, which takes a data-driven approach to improving our understanding of criminal activity and developing robust identifiers and evidence of criminal behaviour. 

  Also receiving a Professorial promotion is University lecturer Dr Neel Krishnaswami. Neel's research interests lie at the intersection of program verification; programming language design; and logic, semantics and type theory.

  University Senior Lecturer Dr Cengiz Oztireli has been promoted to Professor. Cengiz develops algorithms and systems in the areas of computer graphics, vision, and machine learning. "My goal is to have a form of digital visual reality and visual data representations that are easy to understand, generate, and experience," he says.  

  There are also Professorial promotions for Hatice Gunes, Rafal Mantiuk and Robert Mullins.

  Hatice Gunes is a Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics here. Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilising research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and social robotics.

  She has published over 125 papers in these areas, with most recent works on lifelong learning for facial expression recognition, fairness, and affective robotics.

  Rafal Mantiuk is Professor of Graphics and Displays here. His research interests are in applied visual perception; high dynamic range imaging; display algorithms; machine learning for image synthesis; tone-mapping; video coding for new display technologies; image and video quality metrics; visibility metrics; virtual reality and low-level perception; computational photography; computational displays; novel display technologies; colour; perception in computer graphics; novel image and video representations (beyond 2D); psychophysics; and modelling visual perception with machine learning.

  Rob Mullins is Professor in Computer Architecture here. His current research is focused in the area of efficient and secure machine learning, hardware accelerators for machine learning, computer architecture and open-source chip design. He is a founder and director of lowRISC, a not-for-profit company using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open-source silicon designs and tools.

  He was also a founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the UK charity that promotes the study of computer science and electronics at the school level.

  Congratulations to all six on their promotions!

• 'Stand-out' dissertation receives ACM award

  Many congratulations to Research Fellow Conrad Watt whose PhD dissertation today received an Honourable Mention for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

  The Honourable Mention Award, accompanied by a prize of $10,000, was given to Conrad by the Association for Computing Machinery — the world’s largest association of computing professionals.

  He received it for his dissertation on 'Mechanising and evolving the formal semantics of WebAssembly: the Web’s new low-level language'.

  His dissertation is considered a stand-out example of developing and using fully rigorous mechanized semantics to directly affect and improve the designs of major pieces of our industrial computational infrastructure.

  ACM

  ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges.  

  In its citation, the ACM said that Conrad's dissertation "establishes a mechanized semantics for WebAssembly and defines its concurrency model. The model will underpin current and future web engineering. His dissertation is considered a stand-out example of developing and using fully rigorous mechanized semantics to directly affect and improve the designs of major pieces of our industrial computational infrastructure."

  Conrad is Research Fellow here, focusing on mechanised formal verification, concurrency, and the WebAssembly language. He received an MEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London before completing his PhD here in 2021 under the supervision of Professor Peter Sewell.    

  Also receiving an Honourable Mention Award today was Alane Suhr for his doctoral dissertation (at Cornell University) on 'Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems'. Aayush Jain received the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation 'Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions', which established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures.

  EAPLS Best Dissertation Award
  Today's Honourable Mention Award is the second prize Conrad has received for his PhD dissertation, which also won the Best Dissertation Award 2021 from EAPLS, the European Association on Programming Languages and Systems. 

  Every year the EAPLS presents an award to the PhD student they judge to have made the most original and influential contribution to the area of Programming Languages and Systems, and who has graduated from a European academic institute.

  Conrad was selected as winner by a committee of international experts who judged candidates' theses on their originality, significance, and quality of writing. They concluded that Conrad's dissertation was an outstanding piece of work and considered it the best amongst some very strong contenders.

  Conrad's dissertation discusses WebAssembly, the first new programming language to be supported natively by all major Web browsers since JavaScript. It describes a number of ways in which Conrad both helped to shape the specification of WebAssembly, and built upon it.

  By mechanising the WebAssembly formal semantics in Isabelle/HOL while it was being drafted, he discovered a number of errors in the specification, drove the adoption of official corrections, and provided the first type soundness proof for the corrected language.

  In their findings, the jury said that Conrad's work "has placed WebAssembly on a secure footing, which is essential for what is becoming a key Internet technology."

  They added that his research contributions and industrial impact were outstanding and that several flaws he identified in the language specification have now been corrected by the standards body. Moreover, they noted that the efforts he made on collaborating with various researchers and industry experts, providing understanding and knowledge, is commendable.

  EAPLS concluded by saying "We offer Conrad our heartfelt congratulations on his achievement. We are confident that it will be a sign of a long and distinguished scientific career."

• Professor elected to Royal Society Fellowship

  Our colleague Professor Peter Sewell has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, it was announced today (Wednesday 10 May 2023).

  He is among the 80 outstanding researchers, innovators and communicators from around the world who have just been elected as the newest Fellows of the Royal Society. They have been selected for their substantial contribution to the advancement of science.

  The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of sciences and the oldest science academy in continuous existence. Its aim is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

  Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society said: "I am delighted to welcome our newest cohort of Fellows. These individuals have pushed forward the boundaries of their respective fields and had a beneficial influence on the world beyond."

  Peter is Professor of Computer Science here in the Department. In his research, he aims to put the engineering of the real-world computer systems that we all depend on onto better foundations, developing techniques to make systems that are better-understood, more robust and more secure. He is interested especially in how one can develop and use mathematical models for this.

  He and his group are best known for their work on the subtle relaxed-memory concurrency behaviour and detailed sequential semantics of processors and programming languages. They have brought these into the mathematical domain, creating experimentally grounded models that de-mystify them for practitioners and theoreticians, to enable more rigorous engineering and more realistic theory.

  They have done the same at design time for new capability-enabled computer processor architectures that build in better security protection. (Capabilities are a new architectural data type to replace integer pointers, tightly controlling all memory accesses to limit damage.) 

  Peter co-leads, along with Robert Watson and Simon Moore here in Cambridge and Peter Neumann at SRI International, the CHERI cybersecurity project. This extends conventional hardware Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) with new architectural features to enable fine-grained memory protection and highly scalable software compartmentalization.

  For the CHERI project and Arm's 'Morello' industrial prototype (developed and currently being evaluated through the government's £200m Digital Security by Design programme, which he helped instigate), Peter and his colleagues have established machine-checked proof that full-scale architecture specifications have their intended security properties. Morello is the first industrial-scale processor for which the architecture specification has mathematically-proven security properties, providing unprecedented confidence in the approach.

  Of his election as a Royal Society Fellow, Peter says: "This honour is a testament to the work of many excellent colleagues over the years, without whom none of this would have been possible."

  • You can read details of all 80 new Fellows - seven of them, including Peter, from Cambridge University - on the Royal Society website.

   

• Deep Gaussian Processes paper wins AISTATS Test of Time Award

  For their paper on Deep Gaussian Processes, our colleague Professor Neil Lawrence and his former PhD student Dr Andreas Damianou have today won the AISTATS 2023 'Test of Time' Award.

  AISTATS (the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics) is one of the most prominent conferences in machine learning. Each year it features a Test of Time Award recognising a paper from 10 years ago that has had a prominent impact in the field.

  This year the award has gone to Dr Andreas Damianou (now Senior Scientist at Spotify) and Neil Lawrence (pictured right), now DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning here. At the time they authored the paper 'Deep Gaussian Processes', they were both based at the University of Sheffield.

  The development and adaptation of Gaussian processes in machine learning provided the field with a solid foundation to develop regression models. Importantly they provided a statistical framework and gave a principled narrative to the heuristic methodologies at the time.

  Ten years ago when the paper was presented, the Deep Learning revolution had already begun and the benefit of compositing simple models into complex structured was starting to show empirical benefits.

  With a statistical foundation the authors set out to bring principle to this modelling paradigm by presenting a framework that allows a composition of Gaussian processes.

  Providing the mathematical foundation to do inference in these highly intractable structures, the authors showed that composite structures are not just beneficial in the big data setting, but given a sound statistical formulation can be used when data is scarce.

  The paper has had significant impact across many different domains and given the recent prominence of composite probabilistic models, it was work that was clearly ahead of its time and inspired lots of innovative research.  

  Congratulations to Damian and Neil!