King's College, London Wins ISRI Award
Al Sutton from King’s College, London wins The Internation Systems Research Institute (“ISRI”) 1997 Award of a top of the range Hewlett-Packard Vectra Pentium 200 worth 3,000 pounds.
Al Sutton, a BSc. in Maths and Computer Science, received his award from Ron McQuaker, President of the British Computer Society at Coutts Bank in London, before an audience of 70 IT Directors and leading IT Academics from Universities from all over the UK. Al commented “I was absolutely delighted to win this fantastic HP PC, particularly as it will help me in my future career. My project is about bringing e-mail into peoples homes in a very user-friendly way in order to combat “techno-phobia” and addressed the operational problems of access to e-mail. I have designed my e-mail product to work as an extension to a Two Way TV home unit which is an existing interactive television system.”
ISRI is in its' second year and the number of IT Directors and Academics who travelled to London for the Awards' ceremony is a testament to the support the charity has gained in the academic and corporate spheres.
Peter Hall, Chief Executive of ISRI stated, “The Award Judges from Family Assurance, Legal & General, Systems International, Sussex University, and the University of Brighton were highly impressed with the quality and subject matter of the projects which had been submitted. We assessed projects on: commercial relevance, originality, comprehensiveness, and clarity and presentation of the project. It was hard to choose the winner from the four shortlisted projects. In the end we felt that Al Sutton’s project was the most commercially viable of the four shortlisted projects.”
Ian Miles, General Manager of Hewlett-Packard’s UK Computer Products Organisation, was so impressed with the quality of the projects that he spontaneously decided to donate three HP Palmtop PCs to the three runners-up. They were:
Mary Ruhl from the University of Sterling with Multimedia Marketing in the Fashion Industry. Peter Keen from Nottingham Trent University with Development of an Embedded Processor to Monitor the Performance of Pantographs on Electric Trains. Damian Reeves from Cambridge University with A Distributed WWW Proxy. Professor Derek Coleman, Head of Department of Computer Science, King’s College, London commented about ISRI, “I am extremely proud that Al Sutton has won the ISRI prize for best project. ISRI is making a real contribution to Computer Science Education in the UK with this new award for commercially relevant student projects. My Department strongly believes that computer science education must be technically sound and relevant to the needs of the wider world. Al’s project on bringing e-mail into the home is a fine testament to the value of this approach.”
For further information please contact:
Peter Hall International Systems Research Institute Tel: +44 1273 766781
or
Denise Pritchard Integrated Marketing Limited Tel: +44 1273 556888
About ISRI
The International Systems Research Institute is a registered charity. Its' two key objectives are:
To encourage and promote innovation in the commercial and industrial application of information technology. To manage the distribution of surplus computer equipment from companies to educational establishments which can demonstrate the value that the equipment will being to their students.e project.