skip to primary navigationskip to content

Department of Computer Science and Technology

Miscellaneous

 

Honours

Department of Computer Science and Technology - Awards and honours

  • Mobile health-monitoring device wins ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant
    Cecilia Mascolo is Professor of Mobile Systems here

    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
    Image of PhD students Lorena Qendro (left) and Andrea Ferlini working with a Nokia Bell Labs' earable prototype as part of a collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs.

    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!

     

  • Presenting the 2022 Hall of Fame Awards
    Dmitry Kazhdan and Botty Dimanov receive the Company Of The Year Award from Dr Carl Henrik Ek at the Hall of Fame Awards

    A company aiming to 'invent the way humanity interacts with AI'; a project investigating if we can identify patients with Alzheimer’s disease by using GPS to track how well they navigate their way round their local area; a platform offering a unified approach to federated learning; and a research centre scaling up the supply of deforestation-avoidance carbon credits to help tackle tropical deforestation. 

    These are the winners of our Hall of Fame Awards 2022. The awards were presented at a ceremony at Queens' College this evening.

    The Hall of Fame is the group of companies set up by students, staff and alumni of this Department – and there are now over 320 of them. "We are very proud of this," says Ben Karniely, coordinator of our alumni association, the Cambridge Ring. "It is an indication of the impact that our Department has on the computing industry and the world of technology."

    The Hall of Fame Awards are given in four categories:

    Company of the Year 2022: Tenyks

    Tenyks is a spin-out from this Department that aims, as its founders say, 'to invent the way humanity interacts with AI'. It is focused on helping machine learning engineers build better, safer artificial intelligence. Tenyks' platform helps developers understand what’s wrong with their algorithms, resolve issues, remove bias, boost model performance, and enhance data quality. It went through the YCombinator Summer Programme in 2021 and last year announced it had raised $3.4 million in seed funding.

    The company was co-founded by former PhD student Botty Dimanov and current PhD students Dmitry Kazhdan and Maleakhi Wijaya – all of whom were recently named in the Forbes '30 Under 30' Europe Class of 2023 list. Tenyks has developed technology that provides insights for computer vision applications at an unprecedented granularity. Botty came up with a patent-pending invention that laid the foundations for Tenyks' technology while working on his PhD here in the Department with Prof Mateja Jamnik. Dmitry and Maleakhi then spent two and a half years fleshing out the practical implications of the research as part of their PhD and Masters work and establishing the engineering scaffolding that could produce a reliable product.

    Product of the Year 2022: Flower

    Another YCombinator company, Flower Labs describes Flower as ‘a Friendly Federated Learning Framework’. It enables machine learning on distributed data by moving the training to the data, instead of moving the data to the training. Flower offers a unified approach to federated learning, analytics, and evaluation and the opportunity to federate any workload, any ML framework, and any programming language. The company was co-created by Nic Lane (left), Professor of Machine Learning Systems here, along with his former PhD student and current Visiting Researcher Daniel Beutel, and fellow current Visiting Researcher Taner Topal.

    More than three years ago, the co-founders built Flower to start to create the necessary conditions for AI to evolve with core collaborative principles and with data allowed to remain in its natural state: distributed and under control by those who generate it. Its approach is community-first and open-source. It has evolved to become an easy way for someone to take a centralized machine learning method, and allow it to become federated.

    Flower is now being used by universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, MIT, and the Technical University of Munich, and organisations including Brave, Orange, Samsung, Siemens and Accenture, among others.

    Above left: Prof Nic Lane (left) and Daniel Beutel (centre) receiving the Product of the Year award for Flower from Dr Carl Henrik Ek.

    Better Future Award 2022: The Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C)

    The Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C) was launched in early November 2021 as an interdisciplinary collaboration between this Department (Computer Science) and the Departments of Plant Sciences and Zoology. The Centre's first goal is to scale up the supply of deforestation-avoidance carbon credits in order to halt tropical deforestation as soon as possible. The Centre is currently working on a prototype of a trusted nature-based marketplace.

    As co-founders Anil Madhavapeddy (Professor of Planetary Computing) and Srinivasan Keshav (Robert Sansom Professor of Computer Science, right) say: “The world is facing simultaneous biodiversity and climate crises. Pressure is mounting from governments and the general public to rapidly roll out a global programme of well-executed nature-based solutions to sequester several giga-tons of carbon each year and protect biodiversity. Over 100 world leaders at COP26 pledged to end deforestation by 2030. Our urgent challenge is figuring out how to verify that deforestation solutions are working, and tracking the associated carbon credits used to offset necessary emissions."

    The Centre is creating digital tools and a trusted, decentralized platform to help purchasers of carbon credits to confidently and directly fund trusted deforestation avoidance projects, bringing together corporate funders and conservationists via automated and transparent smart contracting tools. 

    Above right: Prof Anil Madhavapeddy and Eleanor Toye Scott receive the Better Future Award for the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

    Publication of the Year 2022: Machine Learning Detects Altered Spatial Navigation Features in Outdoor Behaviour of Alzheimer’s Disease Patients (Abhirup Ghosh, Vaisakh Puthusseryppady, Dennis Chan, Cecilia Mascolo, Michael Hornberger)

    This paper was a collaboration between members of this Department (Research Associate Abhirup Ghosh and Cecilia Mascolo, left, Professor of Mobile Systems) and colleagues at the Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. Impaired navigation is one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but rather than studying patients’ real life behaviour, the authors pointed out that studies to date have instead involved proxy tests of navigation. They set out to address this by investigating if it's possible to identify Alzheimer’s patients by using GPS tracking to see how they navigate their way round their local area.

    Their results highlighted that real-world navigation patterns could indeed be used as a valid behavioural marker for Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers also suggested applying their approach to studying navigational data from patients with less advanced Alzheimer’s to see if it could be used to detect dementia earlier. Their work will also inform future studies in patients with Alzheimer’s who are at risk of getting lost and they say it could also lead to the development of algorithms based on real-world GPS data to calculate the risk factors for dementia patients getting lost.

    Above left: Research Associate Abhirup Ghosh and Cecilia Mascolo, Professor of Mobile Systems, receiving the Publication of the Year award 2022.

  • Getting ready to welcome two new Gates Scholars

    We look forward to welcoming Gates Scholars 2023 Anais Berkes and Gregor Feierabend when they join us later this year!

    Anais and Gregor are two of the incoming Gates Cambridge Class of 2023, which has just been announced. Seventy-seven new Gates Scholars from across the world will be starting their studies in Cambridge this autumn.

    Anais, from Germany, is coming here to study for a PhD during which she will pursue her interest in how AI can be used to combat climate change and save the natural world.

    "I first thought about this as an undergraduate computer science student, conducting research for both ETH Zurich and Cambridge," she says. "I studied AI’s role in the transition to clean energy and the adoption of distributed solar production technologies in residential housing."

    I will explore how the predictive capabilities, reliability, and multi-variable pattern recognition power of AI can be used to preserve and protect the natural world.

    Anais Berkes

    "It is my mission to fully leverage the potential applications of AI in the fight against climate change. I will explore how the predictive capabilities, reliability, and multi-variable pattern recognition power of AI can be used to preserve and protect the natural world."

    Gregor, also from Germany, is joining us from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa where he has been studying mathematics and computer science. 

    Here, he'll be working towards an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science, pursuing his interest in formal languages, which are "omnipresent in computer science and fundamental in the development of, for example, network protocols or programming languages."

    Gregor's current research interests lie in the applications of category theory and mathematical logic to formal language theory. He is also interested in the related area of proof assistants and their use in building provably correct software.

    The abstract nature of these topics leads to potential applications in a wide range of subjects. Thus, I hope to be an inspiration to and equally be inspired by the multidisciplinary and diverse Gates Cambridge community.

    Gregor Feierabend

    Gates Cambridge
    The Gates Cambridge scholarship programme is the University of Cambridge’s flagship international postgraduate scholarship programme.

    It was established through a US$210 million donation to the University of Cambridge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 and since the first class in 2001, Gates Cambridge has awarded 2,100 scholarships to scholars from 112 countries. 

    In addition to generous funding to do their research, the new scholars will benefit from the strong sense of community and identity that has been forged by their predecessors and an absolute commitment to improving the lives of others.

    Solar power for rural Indonesian communities
    Anais-Marie is a global ambassador for AI’s potential in environmental protection and has been involved in setting up a non-government organisation to bring solar power to rural communities in Indonesia.

    She says: "My research at Cambridge will shape the way in which AI is used to combat climate change. I will leverage recent developments in the field of AI to create solutions that reduce carbon emissions, protect our environment and allow people to live more sustainable lives.

    "My goal is for my research to have practical everyday applications, which makes interdisciplinary collaboration essential for my work. I see my mission as redesigning our interactions with the natural world and inspiring next generations to reshape our future."

    Professor Eilís Ferran, Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, said: "It gives me great pleasure to announce the class of 2023. Like their predecessors, they are both intellectually outstanding and demonstrate the kind of leadership qualities needed to tackle the complex global challenges we face today.

    "We know that these scholars will flourish in the rich, international community at Cambridge and will go on to make a significant impact in their fields and to the wider global community."

More award news ...

Older award news (before 2007)

Awards for Professor Karen Spärck Jones

  • 2007 BCS Lovelace Medal
  • 2007 ACM Athena Lecturer
  • 2006 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award

Andy Hopper has been made a CBE

Prof. Andy Hopper as been made a Commander of the British Empire in the 2007 New Year Honours list for services to the computer industry.

Andy Hopper elected FRS

Prof. Andy Hopper was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

2005 IBM ThinkPad Challenge

Each year the winning Part IB Group Project Team is invited to participate in the IBM ThinkPad Challenge at Hursley. In 2005, Cambridge has become the first university, among the 18 that compete, to win the Thinkpad Challenge twice.

Andy Hopper receives IEE Mountbatten Medal

Prof Andy Hopper was the recipient of the IEE Mountbatten Medal 2004, for his work in the computer industry and in helping the development of UK computer companies.

Keir Fraser wins BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award

Dr Keir Fraser was awarded one of the two 2004 British Computer Society/Council of Professors and Heads of Computing Distinguished Dissertation Awards for his PhD dissertation "Practical Lock-Freedom", supervised by Dr Ian Pratt. A second Computer Lab dissertation, "Reconfigurable wavelengths-switched optical networks for the internet core" by Dr Tim Granger, was one of the seven shortlisted for the award. Tim was supervised by Prof. Ian Leslie.

Andy Hopper receives ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award

Prof Andy Hopper was given the SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award in Philadelphia on 28 September 2004 for pioneering new areas of research in wireless and mobile computing, driven by a unique blend of innovative academic research and recognition of its commercial potential.

Robin Milner receives Royal Society of Edinburgh Royal Gold Medal

Professor Robin Milner was awarded a Royal Gold Medal for outstanding achievement at a ceremony held in The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) on 2 September 2004. The medal was awarded for his "outstanding contributions to software engineering which have changed the face of modern computer science."

Karen Spärck Jones receives ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

Prof Karen Spärck Jones was given the Association for Computational Linguistics' Lifetime Achievement Award at the 42nd annual meeting of the ACL in Barcelona on 23 July 2004. These awards began in 2002; Prof Spärck Jones is only the third recipient.

Andy Hopper receives Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal

On 5 July 2003 Prof Andy Hopper was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal in recognition of an oustanding and demonstrated contribution to British engineering leading to market exploitation.

Martin Richards receives IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award

Martin Richards has been awarded one of the IEEE Computer Society's 2003 Computer Pioneer Awards for pioneering system software portability through the programming language BCPL, widely influential and used in academia and industry for a variety of prominent system software applications.

BCPL is a simple typeless language that was designed in 1966. It was the precursor to Ken Thomson's B, and the two gave rise to C.

David Wheeler made Fellow of the Computer History Museum

In October 2003, Prof David Wheeler was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his invention of the closed subroutine, his architectural contributions to the ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, and computer testing.

2003 SET Awards

James Murphy (Jesus College) received the IEE Award for Best Information Technology Student at the national Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards in September 2003. This is the third year, running, that a Cambridge student has received the SET award for best IT or CS student.

James' Part II project, the subject of his nomination, was on modelling smoke for computer graphics. This involved solving the equations governing fluid motion (Euler, Navier-Stokes, mass conservation equations) in a stable way to simulate the motion of the smoke, in order to create physically plausible smoke. The solution method was based on a finite grid (Eulerian) discretization and solving the system of sparse linear equations thus produced required the implementation of several numerical methods. He was supervised by Dr Neil Dodgson who says: "James' project was a challenging piece of work; the award is well deserved."

2003 IBM ThinkPad Challenge

Each year the winning Part IB Group Project Team is invited to participate in the IBM ThinkPad Challenge at Hursley. In 2003, the Cambridge team were the outright winners of the ThinkPad Challenge. The final of the contest was held at Hursley on 26 September 2003 with teams from 18 of the best UK Universities battling against each other to win an IBM ThinkPad for each member of the team.

The Cambridge team were: Arthur Taylor, Christian Steinruecken, Andrew Owen, Muntasir Ali, Rui Wang and Sean Moran.

2002 SET Awards

Tim Hospedales of Jesus College received the MISYS Award for the Best Computer or Computer Software Student at the national Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year Awards in September 2002. The SET awards are judged based on students' final year projects. Tim's Part II Project was on eye-movement tracking.

2001 SET Awards

Hanna Wallach (Newnham College) received the MISYS Award for the Best Computer or Computer Software Student for her project "Visual Representation of Computer Aided Design Constraints".

Distinguished Dissertations

2004, Keir Fraser, "Practical Lock-Freedom"
2000, Jacques Fleuriot, "A combination of geometry theorem proving and nonstandard analysis with application to Newton's Principia"
1997, John Harrison, "Theorem proving with real numbers"
1994, Sai-Lai Lo, "A modular and extensible network storage architecture"
1993, Andrew D. Gordon, "Functional programming and input/output"
1990, Andrew Harter, "Three-dimensional integrated circuit layout"

Honours Lists

Prof Andy Hopper received a CBE in 2007.
Prof Roger Needham received a CBE in 2001.
Prof Maurice Wilkes was knighted in 2000.
Dr John Daugman received an OBE in 2000.

Fellowships

Royal Society

Prof Andy Hopper (2006)
Prof Mike Gordon (1994)
Prof Robin Milner (1988)
Prof Roger Needham (1985)
Prof David Wheeler (1981)
Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes (1956)

Royal Academy of Engineering

Prof Jon Crowcroft (1999)
Prof Andy Hopper (1996)
Prof Roger Needham (1993)
Prof Sir Maurice Wilkes (1976)

British Academy

Prof Karen Spärck Jones (1995)