He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog.

[3] Colmerauer spent 1967–1970 as assistant professor at the University of Montreal,[3] where he created Q-Systems, one of the earliest linguistic formalisms used in the development of the TAUM-METEO machine translation prototype.

[2] Developing Prolog III in 1984, he was one of the main founders of the field of constraint logic programming.

[3] Despite retiring as emeritus professor in 2006,[3] he remained a member of the artificial intelligence taskforce in Luminy.

The Prize is given for recent accomplishments and practical advances in Prolog-inspired computing, understood in a broad sense, where foundational, technological, and practical contributions are eligible with proven evidence or potential for the future development of Logic Programming.