CCSCAN: finding the right award for the right person
I chair the Awards Committee of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge, and one thing I have learned in that role is that excellent people often don’t get nominated for the awards they deserve. Usually this is because nobody knew the award existed, or knew it too late, or wasn’t sure the candidate was eligible. Also, nominations take time: gathering letters and endorsements can easily take six weeks, so learning about a deadline two weeks out is often the same as missing it.
To address this, I used Claude to build the Cambridge Computer Science Awards Navigator (CCSCAN). It started with an initial list compiled by Katherine Leckie, and now covers about 250 awards, prizes, fellowships and grants from bodies such as ACM, IEEE, AAAI, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, BCS and the ERC.
You describe the candidate, whether yourself or someone you would like to nominate:
- Who — a person, a team, a paper (for test-of-time awards), a software system, or an organisation.
- Career stage — PhD student or postdoc, early, mid, or established career.
- Areas of work — twenty areas, from systems and networking to HCI, theory, computational biology, and energy and climate, plus teaching, service and public engagement. Awards open to any area of computing can be included or not.
- Eligibility — conditions such as an age limit, being based in the UK or Europe, or awards specifically for women.
CCSCAN then lists the matching awards in deadline order, grouped by month, with a note on what each nomination needs: who can nominate, whether self-nomination is allowed, how many letters are required, and a suggested “start by” date. You can star awards to build a shortlist and copy it out as text.
Deadlines are checked against each award’s official page and refreshed monthly. Where a deadline for the next cycle has not yet been announced, CCSCAN projects it from the previous round and labels it as an estimate. Either way, please confirm on the official page before you start.
Please share CCSCAN widely, especially with PhD students, postdocs, and early-career colleagues: they have the most to gain and are the least likely to be nominated by someone else. Also, the list has a UK bias, reflecting where it started. If you spot a missing award, a wrong date, or an award from your own country that should be there, use the “Email a suggestion” button on the page, with a link to the award’s official page.