I was invited down to the House of Commons on Thursday for the 7th annual OpenUK Awards ceremony, which is the 'Oscars of open source' celebrated in a uniquely British style. I've done lots of (unpaid) things with OpenUK in the past, from sitting on their sustainability advisory board to attending the Indian AI summit and speaking at their recent Space Tech radar launch.
This time though, Tessera had been nominated for the open source project of the year in the software category, a huge surprise for our our one-year old university effort! I finished my lectures and supervisions in Cambridge and donned my tuxedo, adjusted my bowtie, grabbed my House of Lords hipflask and legged it down to Parliament for the evening!
While I enjoyed all of the wonderful atmosphere and general cheer (helped by the recent US and Brazilian election results!), I particularly enjoyed an impromptu speech by Enrica Porcari, the CIO of CERN. She noted the importance of open source towards underpinning the huge physics results being worked on there. She also noted that they've just entered a long shutdown phase to upgrade to the High-Luminosity LHC for the next few years. Because of this shutdown, apparently there will be tours of CERN available soon where you can walk inside the particle accelerator!!
The best bit of getting an award like this is the recognition it gives our home domain of environmental science, as my passion is energising computer programmers to contribute their skills towards helping the planet. Lots of people came up to me after the award enquiring what Tessera does, and I used TZE on my phone to show them live classifications.
On behalf of the entire Tessera team, we're really grateful to OpenUK and the lovely UK community for the recognition and the opportunity to talk environment at Parliament!
