As Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, it is my honour to select the recipient of the annual Wilkes Award, awarded to the authors of the best paper published in the previous year’s volume. The key judging criteria for the Award are originality and quality of theme and treatment, as assessed by an expert judging panel.
We are thus pleased to announce this year’s winning and runner up papers for the 2022 Wilkes Award for Volume 64 (2021):
Winning paper
Terminating Exploration of a Grid by an Optimal Number of Asynchronous Oblivious Robots
Stéphane Devismes, Anissa Lamani, Franck Petit, Pascal Raymond and Sébastien Tixeuil
The Computer Journal, Volume 64, Issue 1 (January 2021)
https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxz166
This paper addresses a well-defined question in distributed robotics: how many robots — each without memory of past actions, a shared sense of direction, or any means of communication beyond observing one another’s positions — are required to explore a grid-shaped network and then halt. The authors establish tight bounds, proving that three robots are both necessary and sufficient to explore any grid of at least three nodes and terminate, with two exceptions resolved separately: a 2×2 grid requires four robots, and a 3×3 grid requires five. These bounds are matched by deterministic algorithms operating in the asynchronous model, the weaker and more realistic of the two models typically considered in this area, each completing exploration in a number of moves linear in the size of the grid. The result is notable for its contrast with the equivalent problem on ring networks, where deterministic exploration requires five robots and a coprimality condition relating the robot count to the ring size; no such condition applies to grids. The combination of matching lower and upper bounds, careful proof technique (including the use of model-checking to manage the case analysis for the harder 3×3 case), and a conclusion that runs against the intuition established by prior ring-exploration results made this a strong choice for the Award.
Runner up
Improving Human Action Recognition Using Hierarchical Features and Multiple Classifier Ensembles
Mohammad Farhad Bulbul, Saiful Islam, Yatong Zhou and Hazrat Ali
The Computer Journal, Volume 64, Issue 11 (November 2021)
https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxz123
The runner-up paper addresses a more applied problem: human action recognition from depth-camera video, with applications including fall detection, rehabilitation monitoring, and gesture-based interfaces. Where much prior work derived features from motion information alone, the authors extract both motion and static information from each video sequence and combine these through an ensemble of classifiers. Evaluated across three benchmark datasets, the approach achieves accuracy competitive with, and in several cases exceeding, existing methods, including some deep learning approaches, while remaining efficient enough for near real-time operation. Together, the two papers reflect the range of work the journal publishes, from foundational distributed computing theory to applied, evaluation-driven systems research.
You can browse previous winners of the Wilkes Award, and find out more about the Award itself. Thank you also to the 2022 Wilkes Award judging panel:
- Professor Alan Marshall, University of Liverpool, UK
- Professor Fionn Murtagh, University of Huddersfield, UK
- Professor Chris Mitchell, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
The award is named after Sir Maurice Wilkes (1913-2010), Director of the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1945 to 1980, throughout the development of stored program computers starting with EDSAC, which ran the first realistic programs on a stored-program electronic computer in 1949. He went on to invent microprogramming, and, with David Wheeler and Stanley Gill, developed an early programming system based on subroutines and labels that shaped how software was written for decades afterwards. Wilkes was also the founding President of the British Computer Society (1957-60), received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1967, and was knighted for his services to computing in 2000.
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