[2019] Miltos Allamanis, Informatics graduate from 2017 won this year’s Distinguished Dissertation, a prestigious academic award, run jointly by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in collaboration with the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC). Miltos won the competition for his PhD ‘Learning Natural Coding Conventions’. He was supervised by Charles Sutton and Andrew Gordon. Currently, Miltos is as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK and is part of the Deep Program Understanding project. The basis of his PhD was using machine learning to create better tools for software engineers. By learning from existing code, his aim is to create useful machine learning-based software engineering tools, interfaces and insights. Alkmini Sgouritsa, University of Liverpool, was the highly-commended runner-up for ‘Algorithms for Game-Theoretic Environments’. The competition aims to increase the visibility of the significant research contributions made by the UK to computer science, especially by postgraduate students. Due to the substantial number of high-quality dissertation entries, the committee extended their examining time to ensure that they found the one dissertation that stood above the others. “The selection this year took a significant amount of time. This is tribute to the quality of all the submissions. The prestige of this award brings attention to the high-quality research of the winners and, hopefully, improves their career prospects.” Dr Iain PhillipsThe Chair of CPHC / BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition Committee, Loughborough University The winner will be presented with their award at the BCS sponsored annual Roger Needham award in June 2019. Related links Miltos’ Personal Page BSC The Chartered Institute for IT This article was published on 2024-03-18
