The Lovelace Medal was established by the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awardees deliver the Lovelace Lecture. The award is named after Countess

Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...

, an English mathematician, scientist, and writer. Lovelace was the daughter of

Lord Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and Peerage of the United Kingdom, peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and h ...

. She worked with computer pioneer

Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered ...

on the proposed mechanical general-purpose computer – the

Analytical Engine The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a des ...

, in 1842 and is often described as the world's first female

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

. The medal is intended to be presented to individuals, without regard to their countries of domicile, provided a direct connection to the UK. It is generally anticipated that there will be one medalist each year, but the regulation does not preclude either several medalists or no medalist.

Medal recipients

Awardees include: *2020

Ian Horrocks Ian Robert Horrocks One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research ...

– for significant contributions to the advancements of reasoning systems *2020 Nick Jennings and

Michael Wooldridge Michael Richard Lewis Wooldridge (born 7 November 1956) is an Australian doctor, company director, and former politician. He served as deputy leader of the Liberal Party from 1993 to 1994, under John Hewson. In the Howard Government he held mi ...

– for contributions to

multi-agent systems A multi-agent system (MAS or "self-organized system") is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents.Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Jang, I.; Arvin, F.; Lanzon, A.,A Decentralized Cluster Formation Containment Framework fo ...

*2019

Marta Kwiatkowska Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fellow of Tri ...

– for probabilistic model checking for the data-rich world *2018

Gordon Plotkin Gordon David Plotkin, (born 9 September 1946) is a theoretical computer scientist in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Plotkin is probably best known for his introduction of structural operational semantics (SOS) and hi ...

– for contributions to semantic framework for programming languages *2017

Georg Gottlob Georg Gottlob FRS is an Austrian computer scientist who works in the areas of database theory, logic, and artificial intelligence and is Professor of Informatics at the University of Oxford. Education Gottlob obtained his undergraduate and PhD ...

– for contributions to the logical and theoretical foundations of databases *2016 Andrew Blake – for contributions to the understanding and advancement of computing as a discipline *2015 Ross Anderson – for contributions to building security engineering into a discipline *2014

Steve Furber Stephen Byram Furber (born 21 March 1953) is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, currently the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. A ...

– for designing the ARM microprocessor architecture and contributions to computer systems *2013

Samson Abramsky Samson Abramsky (born 12 March 1953) is Professor of Computer Science at University College London. He was previously the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, from 2000 to 2021. He has made contributions to t ...

– for contributions to domain theory, game semantics and categorical quantum mechanics *2012

Grady Booch Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software archi ...

– for contributions to software architecture, software engineering and collaborative environments *2011

Hermann Hauser Hermann Maria Hauser, KBE, FRS, FREng, FInstP, CPhys (born 1948) is an Austrian-born entrepreneur, venture capitalist and inventor who is primarily associated with the Cambridge technology community in England. Education and early life W ...

– for entrepreneurship and for co-developing the BBC Micro Computer *2010

John C. Reynolds John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist. Education and affiliations John Reynolds studied at Purdue University and then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in theoretical physics from Harvard U ...

– for contributions to logical foundations of programs and programming languages *2009

Yorick Wilks Yorick Wilks FBCS (born 27 October 1939), a British computer scientist, is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College (a post created especiall ...

– for contributions to meaning-based understanding of natural language *2008

Tony Storey The Lovelace Medal was established by the British Computer Society in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awar ...

– for contributions to Autonomic Computing *2007

Karen Spärck Jones Karen Sparck Jones is a computer science researcher and innovator who pioneered the search engine algorithm known as inverse document frequency (IDF). While many early information scientists and computer engineers were focused on developing progr ...

– for contributions to natural language processing *2006

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

– for inventing the World Wide Web *2005

Nick McKeown Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is the SVP/GM of the Network and Edge Group at Intel and a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon ...

– for contributions to router hardware design *2004

John Warnock John Edward Warnock (born October 6, 1940) is an American computer scientist and businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke. Warnock was President of Adobe for ...

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

– for contributions in document processing *2002 Ian Foster and

Carl Kesselman Carl Kesselman is an American computer scientist specializing in grid computing technologies. This term was developed by him and professor Ian Foster in the book ''The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure''. He and Foster are winner ...

– for contributions to

grid computing Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from co ...

*2001 Douglas C. Engelbart – for inventing the computer mouse *2000

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also c ...

– for creating the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

operating system *1998

Michael A. Jackson Michael Jackson (1958–2009) was an American singer, songwriter and dancer known as the "King of Pop". Michael Jackson, Mike Jackson, or Mick Jackson may also refer to: People Entertainment industry * Michael Jackson (radio commentator) (1934 ...

and Chris Burton – for program design and structured programming

References

External links

* {{official, url=https://www.bcs.org/more/awards-and-competitions/lovelace-medal/ 1998 establishments in the United Kingdom Awards established in 1998 Computer science awards British science and technology awards British Computer Society

Medal recipients

See also

References

External links