The EC3 Awards Committee oversees the conferral of the community’s three annual awards, through which we recognise the colleagues whose work over the preceding year has most advanced our field. The awards are presented during the EC3 Conference, on the final day, at the conference dinner.
Composition
In keeping with the EC3 Charter, the committee is convened from the award namesakes, who hold a lifelong place on it, together with the most recent recipients of the three awards. The namesakes are Professor Raimar Scherer, Professor Antony (Tony) Thorpe, and Professor Ian Smith; they provide continuity and act as the custodians of the spirit in which each award was founded. The recent recipients, who serve for the cycle following their own recognition, bring the perspective of those most lately honoured by the community.
The committee is convened and supported by the Awards Chair, whose role is to facilitate the process rather than to adjudicate. In practice this means consolidating the submissions, safeguarding against conflicts of interest and other biases, and ensuring that the strongest candidates are recognised on the basis of the applications and nominations received.
The Awards
EC3 confers three awards, each honouring a distinct form of contribution.
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The Smith Prize recognises and rewards outstanding contributions to computing education.
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The Thorpe Medal recognises a paper that contributes to either the practical or the research aspects of engineering and informatics disciplines in the built environment.
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The Scherer Award recognises outstanding service to the computing community in the context of EC3. Here, outstanding service refers to contributions that go beyond research and teaching; it concerns work that supports and benefits the academic community, in practice and at large.
Process
Applications and nominations are collected and publicised through the EC3 website, ahead of an annual submissions deadline. Once submissions have closed, the Chair circulates them to the committee; the committee then holds a consensus meeting to agree the nominees for each award and, wherever possible, reaches its decision by consensus. The recommendations are reviewed and the awards are announced at the EC3 Conference.