Qiang Shen

2012 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth on Alan Turing, the founder of computer science and a figurehead for the code breaking efforts of WWII. I nominate Professor Qiang Shen, FBCS, Head of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Aberystwyth, to carry the Olympic

flame in his memory. Alan Turing is widely known for his role in

developing computing methods for code breaking in WWII, but this is only a small part of his truly inspiring work. He created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer and laid the foundations for the field of Artificial Intelligence. These achievements led to the computerised era we live in today, and prepared the way for the robotics research being carried out at Aberystwyth University. Professor Shen, as a world-leading researcher in Computational Intelligence and ambassador for computer science, would be a fitting tribute to Alan Turing, and an inspiration to future generations of scientists and engineers. CR