HP researcher wins technology prize

Alan Kay, a Hewlett-Packard researcher, has received the Kyoto Prize in the Advanced Technology category from the Inamori Foundation. The prize, now in its 20th year, is accompanied by a $450,000 cash award. It was started by Kyocera founder Kazuo Inamori to honor technological, scientific and philosophical achievements.

Kay has been instrumental in the development of graphical interfaces, the Smalltalk programming language and seminal PC technology. Earlier this year, Kay shared the National Academy of Engineering's $500,000 award with three other colleagues from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where Kay did much of his early work. And in June, he won the $100,000 Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery.