Monash Lecturer wins international award for the third time running

15 August 2000

Monash University Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering, Damian Conway, won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility for the third consecutive time at Perl Conference 4.0 in Monterey, California, in July.

This year, Dr Conway's award winning technical paper outlined a software module that takes formatted ASCII text and reformats it automatically.

"The main use of the software is to tidy up mail messages," says Dr Conway. He also presented a paper at the conference on programming in Latin.

Overall there were 22 papers presented at Perl Conference 4.0 this year, however Dr Conway says that theoretically the award could have been presented to anyone in the Perl community.

Dr Conway has been the only person to win the Larry Wall Award in the three years since it was established. For this reason, he has decided to disqualify himself from consideration for the award in future years.

In recognition of Dr Conway's ongoing contribution to technical research on the Perl programming language, next year the 'Best Technical Paper' award at the Perl Conference will be renamed the 'Damian Conway Award.'

In 1998, Dr Conway won the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility for his paper on a text-generation module that can correctly inflect English nouns and verbs from the singular to the plural, as well as form participles, ordinals, numeral words and supply a/an correctly.

Last year Dr Conway's award was for a module that takes error messages generated by a Perl program, and converts them automatically into haiku.

Dr Conway completed his Bachelor of Science (1st class Honours) in 1987 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1993 at Monash University.

He has been lecturing at Monash since 1991 and is currently the course leader for the Bachelor of Computer Science.

For further information contact Damian Conway on (03) 9905 5184.