Department of Computer Science and Technology - Awards and honours

• Recognition for "significant achievements in computing"

  Congratulations to Prof Cecilia Mascolo who has today been named a 2024 ACM Distinguished Member. This accolade is awarded to computer scientists "for significant achievements in computing beyond the norm".

  The ACM – the Association for Computing Machinery – is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.

  Its 'Distinguished Member' designation is highly selective. Recipients are chosen for their exceptional technical accomplishments and dedicated community service within the profession.

  In Cecilia's case, she becomes a Distinguished Member for her "contributions to mobile wearable systems efficiency, and signal and data analysis enabling multidisciplinary applications".

  She is one of 56 new Distinguished Members named today for their impact in the field. All were selected by their peers for significant technical achievements as well as volunteer service to their professional community.

  "Each year we look forward to selecting a new class of ACM Distinguished Members from among our worldwide association of 110,000 colleagues," explained ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. "ACM’s motto is 'advancing computing as a science and profession'. The Distinguished Members Program not only celebrates innovation but also underscores the value of being part of a vibrant technical community."

  Cecilia is Professor of Mobile Systems here. She also co-directs the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence here, which focuses on next-generation mobile and wearable technology, as well as mobile applications. 

  She is a pioneer in devising frameworks to collect sensing data from devices such as phones and wearables with the purpose of developing models to understand behaviour and health. During the pandemic, she and her colleagues developed the COVID-19 Sounds App which collects and analyses short recordings of users coughing and breathing to detect if they are suffering from COVID-19.

  Since then, she has been working on ways to turn the devices we wear – such as earbuds – into mobile monitors that can collect data about our state of health, and developing cutting edge machine learning tools to evaluate that data on the device itself.

  She was recently awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship for her project 'HearFit: Hearable Sensing Systems and Machine Learning for Health and Fitness'. This project explores how to turn 'hearable' devices like earbuds into genuinely trustworthy and reliable instruments for measuring human health and fitness. 

  Many congratulations to Cecilia on her ACM Distinguished Member award.

• Lovelace Medal for Dr Sue Sentance

  Many congratulations to our colleague Dr Sue Sentance, Director of the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre here. She has just been awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal 2024.

  This prestigious award is presented annually by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. It is given to recipients for their outstanding contributions to the advancement of computing. 

  Previous winners include worldwide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the information retrieval pioneer Karen Spärck Jones (a former Professor Emerita of Computers and Information here) and recent Nobel Prize winner Sir Demis Hassabis (an alumnus of this Department).

  Also receiving the BCS Lovelace Medal this year are Professor Aggelos Kiayias who is Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy, and Director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Philippa Gardner FREng, a former EPSRC Advanced Fellow here who is now Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at Imperial College London. They are both winners of the Lovelace Research Medal while Sue Sentance receives the Lovelace Education Medal.

  Julia Adamson MBE, BCS Managing Director for Education and Public Benefit , said: "All three recipients of this year’s BCS Lovelace Medal are truly deserving, having significantly advanced the global reputation of computing as a force for good. Their work spans crucial areas such as computing education, cybersecurity, and software languages, each contributing meaningfully to society through information technology.

  "We are proud to honour their achievements at a time when computing is more vital than ever to our daily lives. Their profound impact on the IT industry and their diverse accomplishments make them worthy of this prestigious award."

  Sue Sentence is an experienced educator, researcher and leader in computing education. She is awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in recognition for her exceptional contributions and research in computing education. In particular, her PRIMM approach to teaching programming ('Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify and Make'), which has been adopted by teachers globally.

  Sue also played a leading role in establishing the National Centre for Computing Education and is an active member of the Computing at School board and the BCS School Curriculum and Assessment Committee.  

  Congratulations, Sue!

• Nobel Prize for our alumnus Sir Demis Hassabis

  "The reason I've worked on AI my whole life is that I'm passionate about science and finding out knowledge, and I've always thought if we could build AI in the right way, it could be the ultimate tool to help scientists, help us explore the universe around us. I hope AlphaFold is a first example of that."

  These are the words of our alumnus Sir Demis Hassabis today after he received the news that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was awarding the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 jointly to him and his Google DeepMind colleague Dr John Jumper. The Prize is "for protein structure prediction".

  The award recognises the major advances made possible by their AI model AlphaFold2, with whose help they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. 

  The duo share the award with biochemist Prof David Baker, Director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, who receives it "for computational protein design".

  "It is wonderful to see Demis's work recognised at the highest level — his contributions have been really transformative across many domains. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does next!" says our Head of Department, Professor Alastair Beresford.

  Cambridge University Vice-Chancellor Prof Deborah Prentice has also offered her congratulations to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. "Together, their pioneering work in the development and application of machine learning is helping transform our understanding of the world around us," she says.

  Demis becomes the first of our alumni to receive a Nobel Prize. He studied Computer Science here as an undergraduate from 1994-7 before completing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. 

  It's wonderful to see Demis's work recognised at the highest level — his contributions have been really transformative across many domains.

  Prof Alastair Beresford, Head of Department

   

  He co-founded DeepMind in 2010, a company that devel­oped masterful AI models for popular board games. The company was sold to Google in 2014 and two years later, DeepMind came to global attention when the company achieved what many then believed to be the holy grail of AI: beating the champion player of one of the world’s oldest board­games, Go.

  In 2014, Demis was elected as a Fellow Benefactor and, later, as an Honorary Fellow of Queens' College. In 2024, he was knighted by the King for services to artificial intelligence.

  In 2018, the University announced the establishment of a DeepMind Chair of Machine Learning, thanks to a benefaction from Demis's company, and appointed Professor Neil Lawrence to the position the following year.

  “I have many happy memories from my time as an undergraduate at Cambridge, so it’s now a real honour for DeepMind to be able to contribute back to the Department of Computer Science and Technology and support others through their studies,” Demis said when the Chair was established.   

  As it happens, Demis's Google DeepMind colleague John Jumper is also a Cambridge University alumnus. He completed an MPhil in theoretical condensed matter physics at The Cavendish Laboratory here in 2011 before obtaining his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

  Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind.

  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

   

  "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about pro­teins, life's ingenious chemical tools," says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its press release announcing the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. "David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins' complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

  "In proteins," the Academy adds, "amino acids are linked together in long strings that fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, which is decisive for the protein's function. Since the 1970s, researchers had tried to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences, but this was notoriously difficult. However, four years ago, there was a stunning breakthrough [with AlphaFold2]. Since then, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic."

  They add: "Life could not exist without proteins. That we can now predict protein structures and design our own proteins confers the greatest benefit to humankind."

• 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!