Intelligent students develop intelligent systems

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The winners of an academic bursary for Sussex students were announced last month during the annual prize-giving ceremony at the London headquarters of Searchspace, a multi-national company that develops intelligent systems for business automation.

Three winners (pictured with Jason Kingdon, chief executive of Searchspace) were selected to receive awards for their MSc dissertations:

• John Welch (standing, left) - MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems
• Harry Brignull (seated right) - MSc in Human-Centred Computing Systems
• Zoe Lock (seated left) - MSc in Intelligent Systems.

Mr Kingdon sees academic exploration helping to drive commercial IT development. "It is vital to international commerce that people enter the industry who really do want to question and improve the existing methods of operation. Through their exciting and provocative dissertations, these students do just that," he said.

Searchspace - whose co-founder, Suran Goonatilake, studied at Sussex - has awarded the academic bursary on an annual basis since its foundation in 1993. Commenting on the scheme, Mr Kingdon added: "Searchspace takes seriously its role supporting UK academia, and the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at Sussex in particular, as vanguards in research in the computer science and artificial intelligence fields."

Summaries of the winning dissertations are available on the company's web site, www.searchspace.com.