BCS Seeks IT Innovations for Annual UK IT Industry Awards

People all over the world are headed to the movies this weekend, to watch as brilliant inventor Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr., uses his beautiful mind to invent a public safety technology that goes horribly awry in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The British Computer Society is putting out a call to the real Tony Starks of the world, hoping to find out what the top IT thinkers in the United Kingdom have been bending their own perceptual powers toward.

Once a year since 1973, BCS officials have come together to honor the most transformative developments and discoveries in the IT field. The ceremony and awards have gone by a handful of different names in the more than four decades since the program began, but have been dubbed the UK IT Industry Awards since 2009. The 2015 awards ceremony, a black-tie spectacular, will be held Nov. 18 at the Battersea Park Events Arena in London.

Judging has to occur between now and then, of course, but before anything can be judged, the BCS has to amass a field of nominees. And that's why U.K. IT professionals are being sought. If Tony Stark lived in London, then everyone would probably know what he'd been working on, or at least the judges would probably send a delegation to find out — and also to get the correct spelling of his name for the grand prize trophy. Since most actual IT innovators do their work under less high-profile circumstances, however, BCS officials need a little assistance.

The nomination period has been open for a couple of weeks now, but the window to nominate an innovator won't close until July 10, so there's still plenty of time to make your recommendations. There are 25 awards spread across four major categories: Personal Excellence, Organisational Excellence, Technology Innovation Excellence, and Project Excellence.

BCS group CEO Paul Fletcher said in a statement to media that IT innovation makes a vital contribution to society, improving health, wealth and happiness. "The UK IT Awards are a great way of celebrating that positive impact. New technology and digital disruption is dramatically changing the way that businesses operate, public services are used and innovations are made," Fletcher said, "Winning an award not only demonstrates your professionalism and impact in our digital world but sets benchmark of achievement for all to see."

The first-ever award in the long history of the UK IT Industry Awards was given in 1973 to pioneering researcher Tom Kilburn, who in 1964 founded the School of Computer Science at University of Manchester. The second honoree, in 1974, was Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies, one of two independent inventors of packet switched computer networking, a foundational internet technology.