The Royal Society Milner Award, formally the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, is awarded annually by the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

, a London-based

learned society A learned society (; also learned academy, scholarly society, or academic association) is an organization that exists to promote an academic discipline, profession, or a group of related disciplines such as the arts and science. Membership ...

, for "outstanding achievement in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

by a European researcher". The award is supported by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technolog ...

and is named in honour of

Robin Milner Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner (13 January 1934 – 20 March 2010), known as Robin Milner or A. J. R. G. Milner, was a British computer scientist, and a Turing Award winner.

, a prolific pioneer in computer science who, among other contributions, designed LCF and the programming language ML. Recipients should be active researchers in computer science who are either European or have resided in Europe for at least 12 months prior to their nomination. Winners receive a bronze medal and a personal prize of £5,000 and are invited to deliver a public lecture on their research at the Society. The Council of the Royal Society chooses recipients on the recommendation of the Milner Award Committee. The Committee is made up of

Fellows of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemati ...

, Members of the

Académie des sciences The French Academy of Sciences (French: ''Académie des sciences'') is a learned society, founded in 1666 by Louis XIV at the suggestion of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research. It was at ...

(France), and Members of Leopoldina (Germany). Preceding the Milner Award was the Royal Society and Académie des sciences Microsoft Award, which rewarded scientists in Europe for advancements in science using computational methods. It lasted from 2006 to 2009 until it was replaced by the current award. The

ACM SIGPLAN SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on programming languages. Conferences * Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) * Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) * International Symposium on ...

Robin Milner Young Researcher Award is a similar award rewarded for "outstanding contributions by young investigators in the area of programming languages".

Recipients

The inaugural winner

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 h ...

received his prize in 2012 but delivered his public lecture in 2013, the same year as

Serge Abiteboul Serge Joseph Abiteboul (born 25 August 1953 in Paris, France) is a French computer scientist working in the areas of data management, database theory, and finite model theory. Education The son of two hardware store owners, Abiteboul attended ...

. In 2018,

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 ...

became the first female recipient of the award. Although the 2019 recipient

Eugene Myers Eugene Wimberly "Gene" Myers, Jr. (born December 31, 1953) is an American computer scientist and bioinformatician, who is best known for contributing to the early development of the NCBI's BLAST tool for sequence analysis. Education Myers receiv ...

is American, he moved to

Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...

, Germany, in 2012 to become a director of the

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics __NOTOC__ The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) is a biology research institute located in Dresden, Germany. It was founded in 1998 and was fully operational in 2001. More than twenty research groups work in ...

, thus meeting the criteria for a researcher who is European or has lived in Europe for at least 12 months. Due to infection control measures taken because of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

, the 2020 lecture was held as a Zoom

webinar Web conferencing is used as an umbrella term for various types of online conferencing and collaborative services including webinars (web seminars), webcasts, and web meetings. Sometimes it may be used also in the more narrow sense of the peer-l ...

References

External links

* {{featured list Awards of the Royal Society Computer science awards

Recipients

See also

References

External links