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A postgraduate scholarship in business computing honouring the memory of David Caminer is to be offered for the first time this autumn at Middlesex University. Funding of £25,000 to support the scholarship for the next five years has been secured by the LEO Computers Society from the charity AIT (Association for Information Technology). The donation is also eligible for an additional third under the government-led matched funding scheme which aims to increase voluntary giving to universities.

The award is timed to coincide appropriately with the upcoming 60th anniversary of the world's first business application to run live on LEO, the Lyons bakeries' valuation job, on 17 November 1951. It also complements the annual Pinkerton lecture run in conjunction with the IEEE to commemorate the life of John Pinkerton who played the lead hardware role to David Caminer's pioneering software development in the LEO story.

The first David Caminer scholarship will be offered to candidates in September 2011 and will be open to UK students who have demonstrated excellent academic potential and who may be from financially disadvantaged backgrounds. The LEO Foundation and AIT will be closely involved in the selection process.

Caminer scholarships will be based in Middlesex University's School of Engineering and Information Science which makes up a large part of the University's student body - some 3000 undergraduate and postgraduate students out of a total of 5000.

The school has an annual intake of around 1000 students, divided roughly equally between undergraduates and postgraduates. A large percentage of postgraduate students come from overseas as do one in four of all Middlesex University students at large.

The school has a large teaching and research staff of around 100 people and is headed by Professor Martin Loomes, Dean of the school. It was, of course, through Prof Loomes that the late Colin Tully secured an honorary doctorate for David Caminer from Middlesex in his lifetime.

The AIT is a charity giving to various projects in the IT field and funds research projects at a number of universities. It publishes, in association with Palgrave/Macmillan, one of the IT industry's most respected academic journals, the Journal of Information Technology (JIT)