Once a year, Bulgaria’s President Georgi Purvanov gives out the John Atanasoff award for achievements in the field of computer and information technologies and the information society of Bulgaria.

Established in 2003, the award is named after American-born physicist John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995), the son of a Bulgarian immigrant. Atanasoff, together with Clifford Berry, invented the first automatic electronic digital computer, a machine that has come to be known as the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.

Although he only set foot in Bulgaria once, during a 1970 holiday in Europe that took him to several countries, in interviews Atanasoff repeatedly spoke fondly of his Bulgarian ancestry. In local media, he is often referred to as "the Bulgarian inventor of the computer".

Seven
On October 5 2009, Purvanov awarded the seventh John Atanasoff award to Martin Vechev, a Bulgarian scientist who currently works at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York.

Sofia-born Vechev graduated from the local mathematical high school in 1994. After a bachelor’s degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada and a PhD from Cambridge, Vechev started work at IBM Research in 2007.

According to his IBM Research staff profile page, his research interests are in program synthesis, program verification, abstract interpretation and concurrency.
Vechev’s current projects at IBM include Paraglide, a tool to help computers solve multiple inter-dependant problems simultaneously, and QVM, a system to help improve software quality.

Besides the award for Vechev, Purvanov also presented the Atanasoff Award to students for achievements in mathematics and informatics. Based on students’ scores in both local and international mathematics competitions, this award went for the second time to Roumen Hristov.

Science Centre
In his acceptance speech, Vechev asked for more attention to be paid to the problem of Bulgaria’s education and, as he said, "the creation of world class scientists in informatics".

As an example of what he meant, Vechev pointed to his day-to-day work at IBM Research, where he worked with scientists from around the world. "Much to my regret, of the 1000 scientists there, Bulgaria is represented by only a handful of people. Countries with similar-sized populations to Bulgaria are represented by 10 times more scientists," Vechev said.

According to Vechev, the problem was the impossibility of young talented scientists realising their full potential in the Bulgarian system.

"Career development of talented young people just does not continue. This is a symptom of a basic problem in our country; the lack of a system to help create young Bulgarian scientists of international class," Vechev said.

As examples of such systems, Vechev pointed to science centres like the Center Imeda in Spain and the IST-Center in Austria. Such centres, Vechev said, would help reverse the brain drain and stimulate the return of Bulgarian scientists from abroad.

"Scientists who with their international standing and contacts, their knowledge, experience, desire and enthusiasm and return to Bulgaria would contribute to the development of a generation of young Bulgarian scientists," Vechev said.

In his speech, Purvanov had referred to what he called "not a bad idea of the previous government" a joint nanotechnology research centre between Bulgaria and IBM.

The centre, for which contracts were originally signed in May 2009, would have been the first centre of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. "Implementation of the idea might be delayed because of the current financial crisis, but I think it should not be ignored or abandoned," Purvanov said, referring to uncomfirmed reports that the Borissov Cabinet was to scrap the project in a cost-cutting measure.
"Funding science is not an expense, but an investment in the true sense of the word," Purvanov said.