Two University of Sussex students have won cash awards for their computer science final-year projects, sponsored by Searchspace, an intelligent systems for enterprise automation company.

The winner of the best computer science project was Damyan Pepper for "Weaving the SafetyNet: An investigation into the implementation and programming issues surrounding the SafetyNet language".

SafetyNet is a programming language with a high level of security against programmer errors and malicious viruses such as the "I love you" bug.

According to Mr Pepper, SafetyNet has "long-term commercial potential in the deployment of advanced services such as video-conferencing and mobile internet access".

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The artificial intelligence prize went to Tim Cutland for his project, "Genetic data mining with Java and SQL (Structured Query Language)".

By way of background to his research, Mr Cutland said: "Organisations store large amounts of complex data in sets that contain useful latent knowledge. Data mining refers to the process used to analyse these sets and learn rules and patterns within them. I produced a data-mining program by applying a genetic programming technique, based on the Darwinian model of natural selection, to discover knowledge in a variety of data sets."

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Both students graduated this summer from the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. All final-year dissertations were examined for the award. The two winners received Pounds 500 each.

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