Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have developed a mechanism which uses smart computerised agents to control energy storage devices in the home, resulting in energy savings of up to 16 per cent.

In a paper entitled "Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid", which will be delivered at the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) in San Francisco on Thursday (11 August), Dr Thomas Voice describes how he and his colleagues developed a novel decentralised control mechanism to manage micro-storage in the smart grid.

The researchers developed a completely decentralised mechanism which uses agent-based techniques to allow energy suppliers to manage the demand from their consumers, which, in turn, allows them to reduce their wholesale purchasing costs, yielding savings of up to 16 per cent in energy cost for consumers using devices with an average capacity of 10 kWh.

The researchers’ approach involves using a real-time pricing scheme that is broadcast to consumers in advance of each daily period. Computerised agents then buy, sell, and store energy on behalf of the home-owners in order to minimise their net electricity costs. By adjusting the pricing scheme to match the conditions on the wholesale market, the supplier is able to ensure that, as a whole, consumer agents converge to a stable and efficient equilibrium where costs and carbon emissions are minimised.

“In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for the decentralised control of widespread micro-storage in the smart grid,” said Dr Voice. “We see this as an important step to showing that the adoption of widespread, supplier-managed home energy micro-storage is a practical desirable technology to develop for the benefit of both suppliers and consumers. Using the techniques described in this paper, we can envisage energy suppliers providing new tariffs that will incentivise consumers to buy affordable small scale storage devices. In turn this will allow suppliers to manage aggregate load profiles, improve efficiency and reduce carbon output.”

This work as carried out as part of the industrially-funded IDEAS project, led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at ECS, University of Southampton.

Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid

ECS researchers have developed a new free way to generate music through controlling computers.

"Grab a block and add a base beat, turn a block to speed up the high hat - and we have a new way to generate music through controlling the computer," says Dr Enrico Costanza of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, who is launching his Audio d-touch system tomorrow (Thursday 25 August).

Audio d-touch is based on Dr Costanza's research into tangible user interfaces, or TUIs - providing physical control of the system in the immaterial world of computers. Using a standard computer and web cam and deploying simple computer-vision techniques, physical blocks are tracked on a printed board. The position of the blocks then determines how the computer samples and reproduces sound.

"As more of our world moves into the electronic - vinyl and CDs to mp3s, books to eBooks, we lose the satisfying richness of touching physical objects such as paper and drumsticks," says Dr Costanza.

"Audio d-touch allows people to set up and use tangible interfaces in their own home, office or recording studio, or anywhere else they like," he adds. "This is the first time that anyone has developed a free application like this."

A video of the system and the software is available: http://d-touch.org/

Audio d-touch has been devised for more than the simple pleasure of generating sound in a novel way. Tangible User Interfaces are an alternative to virtual worlds and researchers in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are investigating ways to move away from the purely digital world online and to rediscover the richness of our sense of touch.

Dr Costanza has developed Audio d-touch over several years. "Our aim is to advance the field by gaining insight into how tangible interfaces can be used in the real world," he comments. "We are keen to have more people download Audio d-touch and provide us with feedback that will help improve the system."

To try Audio d-touch, all you need is a regular computer equipped with a web-cam and printer. The user creates physical interactive objects and attaches printed visual markers recognized by the Audio d-touch system. The software platform is open and can be extended for applications beyond music synthesis.

Dr Enrico Costanza is a member of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

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For further information on this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

An ECS research project has been nominated for the prestigious title of Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year in the annual Times Higher Education Awards.

Synote, devised and developed by a team led by Dr Mike Wald of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, is an open-source Web application which transforms learning for all students, including those with disabilities.

Dr Wald has already won a series of awards for Synote, which makes multimedia resources widely used in teaching – such as video and audio – easier to access, search, manage and exploit. Learners, teachers, and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronized to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.

Synote has also incorporated crowdsourcing to provide a sustainable method of making audio or video recordings accessible to people who find it difficult to understand speech through hearing alone.

Dr Wald comments: “Automatic captioning of lectures is possible using speech recognition technologies but it results in recognition errors requiring manual correction and this is costly and time-consuming.

“'Crowdsourcing' the corrections of speech recognition transcription errors is a sustainable way of captioning lecture recordings.”

"I am delighted that Synote has been appreciated and used throughout the world and has won and been nominated for so many awards since the first version was made available in 2008," said Dr Wald.

The Times Higher Education Awards will be announced at a ceremony in London at the Grosvenor House Hotel on 24 November.

The University of Southampton has received two other nominations: for the prestigious title of ‘University of the Year’, recognizing the University’s bold and imaginative initiatives such as taking a leading role in curriculum innovation, pioneering the next generation of Internet infrastructure and new multidisciplinary ventures in life science, marine technology and biomedical research; and for 'Outstanding Contribution to Sustainable Development' – for the ‘Uni-Cycle’ project, which enhances the University’s commitment to increase recycling and reduce its environmental impact by refurbishing unwanted and donated bikes from around Southampton and putting them back into active use.

Professor Don Nutbeam, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton, says: “The University of Southampton is exceptionally proud and delighted to have received three nominations. This is a reflection of the outstanding effort and continual dedication of our staff, and the pioneering work going on in Southampton.”

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For further information about this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Prospective students and visitors to ECS Open Days on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 September will find excellent endorsement of the quality of ECS courses in the latest National Student Survey (NSS).

The Survey reports each year on student satisfaction with courses across a range of variables. The results are compiled from a survey of final-year students carried out by the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency. Results for ECS-Electronics and Computer Science and all other university courses can be found on the Unistats web site, which also provides information on employability and entry levels to courses.

In the latest survey ECS Computer Science students gave a satisfaction rating of 92% - surpassed in England only by Cambridge, Bristol and West London Universities. The overall satisfaction rating for Electronics and Electrical Engineering students was 86%, which was in the top 20 of UK universities.

Figures for employability of ECS graduates (those in graduate-level jobs six months after graduation) were an outstanding 95% for both Computer Science and Electronics and Electrical Engineering, demonstrating the value that employers place on an ECS degree.

Open Days for prospective students take place this week on Friday and Saturday, 2 & 3 September.

On each of those days ECS-Electronics and Computer Science will be holding a day of tours, presentations, demonstrations and drop-in sessions, highlighting the opportunities available on our degree programmes, and emphasizing the unique character of the School. Visitors will have the chance to see all our undergraduate labs, and to meet past and current students, as well as to find out about our students' excellent career prospects.

Presentations are held in the Turner Sims Building (see map) and begin at 10 am (the Turner Sims is open for registration from 9 am with coffee available); there will then be separate tours and presentations for Computer Science & Software Engineering; Electrical & Electromechanical Engineering; Electronic Engineering; and Information Technology in Organisations. These presentations and tours are repeated at 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm.

Between 12 noon and 2 pm we will be holding two drop-in sessions in the Mountbatten Building where visitors can meet staff and students, tour the labs, watch videos of our Careers Fair and student project work, and find out more from ECS Admissions Tutors. Refreshments will be available. There will also be a presentation on 'Robotics in ECS' by Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner (12 noon in Turner Sims), and a Careers Talk by Joyce Lewis, who runs the ECS employability initiative, at 12.30 in Zepler Building (repeated at 1.15).

The University of Southampton Open Day website provides further information and booking.

'Visiting universities is extremely important in enabling students to find the best place for their study,' says ECS Professor Alun Vaughan. 'There are many factors which make a difference to the kind of educational experience that will suit a particular student and we urge prospective students to take advantage of these visit days to find out as much as they can about what we can offer them.'

Watch our Introduction to ECS Open Days (video) by Professor Alun Vaughan.

Electronics and Electrical Engineering is ranked 1st and 3nd in the UK in recent league tables (The Guardian and The Times May/June 2010) and Computer Science and IT is ranked 5th and 8th.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON OPEN DAY DATA MAP

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

The UK Cabinet Office has published an independent review on privacy and transparency by a researcher from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Dr Kieron O'Hara, Senior Research Fellow in the ECS Web and Internet Science Group, was commissioned in December 2010 to investigate the effect that the UK government's transparency programme would have on the privacy of the citizen. O'Hara's report, 'Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens' is published today (13 September).

The government is trying to open up its data for use by citizens and entrepreneurs, but concerns have been raised about the privacy implications of the programme. Public data does not include personal data, but it is hard to insulate data about government from data about citizens. For example, data about hospitals may have implications about patients; crime maps may be used to identify victims of crime. To prevent this happening, the government anonymises the data it releases.

O'Hara is keen for the transparency programme to succeed. "I think it will revolutionise government," he argues. "Yet it is vital that citizens' privacy is preserved. The transparency programme depends on public confidence, but if people feel it threatens their privacy they will withdraw their trust. Privacy therefore needs to be embedded into the programme as a whole, not just as a bolt-on at the end."

O'Hara interviewed over 30 experts, campaigners and stakeholders, and consulted representatives of more than a dozen government departments and agencies. "It was a bit of a slog at times," he says, "but worth it to understand the breadth of opinion, and strength of feeling, on the issue. Many people are worried by the implications for citizens' privacy, quite reasonably. Others are keen to take advantage of the opening up of government, to make public services more efficient and responsive, and to develop services of their own. It can be a difficult circle to square."

One important issue that arose was the possibility that hackers could re-identify people from anonymised data. "Expert opinion is really split about this," says O'Hara, "and we really lack evidence about how practical the techniques are for doing it. One of my 14 recommendations is that the government commits resources to investigating the real-world threat of re-identification, and I'm hopeful that some steps will be taken in that direction. In general, I've tried to recommend practical administrative steps that the government can take to minimise the risk that government transparency will have deleterious effects on citizens."

O'Hara's investigations have already given him valuable experience, which is being put to use; he has been appointed Chair of the Transparency Sector Panel for Crime and Criminal Justice Data, which scrutinises and advises the Home Office and Ministry of Justice in data publication. ______

For further information on this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

Professor Ted Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext" in the 1960s, will address students and staff at the University of Southampton TODAY (Monday 26 September) as part of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences Distinguished Lecture series.

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This lecture will be streamed live on the Web at: Ted Nelson Live Webstream ____________________________________________________________________________________

In a talk entitled 'Reaching Out of the Paperdigm', Professor Nelson will elaborate on where he believes computer science has taken wrong turns over the past 50 years and highlight changes that need to take place if the discipline is to make "deeper connections".

"The computer world pretends to be finished, but never will be,” he will say.

“In fact it simulates the past: computers for secretaries, as designed by Xerox in the 1970s, have become our working world. Today's ’computer documents’ (.doc and .pdf) simulate paper and the fancy printing of long ago. The Web added trivial one-way jumps, allowing pogo-stick travel between pages. But what of deeper connection?" - he will ask.

Professor Nelson will go on to call for a different infrastructure for computer science.

“We need deep, live documents of a very different kind for the interactive screen, as foreseen by Bush and Engelbart and others, for annotation and detailed discussion and scholarship, for organising and decision-making, for law-making and litigation, and for entirely new forms of writing. Such profusely connected, living documents are still possible, but require a wholly different infrastructure. We will show some of these alternatives.”

'Reaching out of the Paperdigm' takes place in the lecture theatre, Building 32, University Road, Highfield Campus, at 6 pm, on Monday 26 September. No tickets are required and all are welcome.

The Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences comprises ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and Physics and Astronomy.

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For further information about this event contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.