As his partner Justin posted yesterday, Kay –
I first met Kay when I was a callow CS finalist at Warwick in the early 90s. He’d come up to DCS from Cov Uni for a research seminar on autostereoptic displays (odd what you remember), and stayed on to chat afterwards. I’d heard of Kay much earlier; I recall seeing him and his .sig all over the same bits of Usenet that I read, and
I can’t say that he was the sole or even the main reason that I went on to a career in academia, but meeting a young, approachable (but not horribly intense) lecturer certainly helped.
My thoughts are with his friends and family.