Professor Dame Wendy Hall received an ‘Internet and Society Award’ from the Oxford Internet Institute as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations which culminated this month.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has become a major centre for the study of the dramatic societal implications of the Internet. The 10th anniversary celebrations provided the OII with an opportunity to recognize the individuals and organizations that have shaped the development of both the Internet and the Institute, and to look to the future. The Awards were presented to individuals and organizations ‘who have developed the Internet for the public good in Britain’.

Professor Hall received her award as being one of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research into Web Science. She was a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (now Web Science Trust), alongside Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Also honoured were Vint Cerf, Google’s ‘Chief Internet Evangelist’, widely recognized as ‘father of the Internet’; Professor Manuel Castells, of the Open University of Catalonia; Joi Ito, of the Mozilla Foundation; Dr David Clark of MIT, Chief Protocol Architect of the Internet; and Niklas Zennstrom of Skype, Internet entrepreneur.

The Oxford Internet Institute is a part of the Web Science Trust Network of research labs (WSTNet), which links research institutes around the world which are involved in many different aspects of Web Science.

Photographed (standing l-r): Professor Eli Noam, Professor William Dutton (OII), Manuel Castells, Wendy Hall, Vint Cert; (seated) Dame Stephen Shirley, Andrew Graham (Balliol College, Oxford)

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

Two ECS students have been nominated as finalists for the prestigious title of ‘Scholar of the Year’ by the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF).

Tom Dell and Adam Malpass, both in the final year of the MEng degree programme in Electronics at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, were awarded scholarships earlier this year by UKESF, an organization set up to promote the importance and value of electronic engineering as a university discipline and to help provide a strong supply of electronic engineers for UK industry and manufacturing in the future.

The UKESF scholarships include summer placements with some of the country’s leading manufacturers, as well as providing scholarship funds and a place at a high-level summer school. Tom spent his summer working for Aptina Imaging, and Adam worked for Dialog Semiconductor – both companies are affiliated to the UKESF.

A number of ECS students received scholarships and placements this year, including James Imber (Imagination Technologies); Matt Lokes (Imagination Technologies); Fergus Macgarry (Imagination Technologies); Samuel Hipkin (ARM Ltd); Yannik Hopke (ARM Ltd); and Matthew Warnes (ARM Ltd).

The award for Scholar of the Year will be announced at the annual Gala Dinner of the National Microelectronics Institute, being held in London on Thursday 3 November.

"We are very proud of all our students who have done so well in the inaugural Scholarship event of the UKESF", said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS. "Tom and Adam, as finalists in the competition, provide an excellent indication of the strength of our education in Electronic Engineering at the University of Southampton. Along with all the other ECS students awarded Scholarships this year, they have contributed a great deal to ECS, but also to helping ensure a good supply of electronics students in the future. We know that they will also make a strong contribution to industry after they have graduated."

The next event in the Distinguished Lecture series at the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences goes inside the mind of Watson, the IBM computer which took part in the well-knownn US tv quiz show, Jeopardy! and won ...

Watson is a computer system (devised and built by IBM engineers) which is capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level rivalling the best humans at the task. The intriguing and historic contest took place in February this year when Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all time. In this lecture Chris Welty, Research Scientist at IBM's T J Watson Research Center in New York, will discuss how Watson works at a high level with examples from the show.

Chris Welty taught Computer Science at Vassar College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before moving to industrial research. His principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the Semantic Web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team.

The Lecture takes place on Thursday 1 December at 5 pm in the Turner Sims Concert Hall on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome.

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

The Open Data initiative took another huge step forward yesterday (Thursday 3 November) with the launch of a new initiative that will enable consumers to gain unprecedented access to personal data from banks, utilities, telecoms providers and a range of other companies.

Speaking at the launch of the Midata scheme in London, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and Government Open Data Adviser, told the BBC: “This is about getting the information that companies hold about me and you back to you in a form you can use."

Twenty-six companies, including Google, British Gas and MasterCard, have already joined the scheme, which enables customers to access ‘personal data inventories’. Consumers will be able to have better insights into their personal consumption and spending patterns which should lead to better informed choices of products and services. The companies are committed to developing common approaches to data access, and to set protocols on privacy, data security and consumer protection.

Professor Shadbolt has been advising the Government on the release of open data for the last two years, a move that takes advantage of the potential of technologies such as apps to link data in a way that provides new insights into information and to make comparisons.

"By making this information available customers will be able to make better-informed decisions,’ said Professor Shadbolt. ‘It's a movement that's already happening: at the moment we’re used to seeing our buying preferences from online bookstores recommend books back to us and we can share our preferences with friends and social networks – this kind of facility is going to happen everywhere.

"But the Government also holds large amounts of information about us, and I’d like to see us move to a situation where our health, education and tax information is just as accessible.”

Adam Malpass, final-year student in Electronic Engineering at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was last night awarded the first annual Scholar of the Year award by the United Kingdom Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF).

The award was sponsored by IC Group and announced at the NMI’s annual awards ceremony held in London. Speaking at the event Neil Dickens, a director at IC Group, said: “It’s vital for the UK industry’s future growth that we attract, support and retain as many talented young individuals, such as Adam, as possible.

“In a very competitive year Adam stood out from the crowd, especially for his infectious enthusiasm, outstanding contributions to Dialog and his encouragement of younger students to take up electronics.”

During his three-month summer placement with Dialog Semiconductor, the sponsor of his UKESF Scholarship, Adam produced a new design for use in its range of flagship products and delivered a research report to help facilitate a move into a new line of business.

To help inspire younger students to take up electronics Adam has been involved in many activities with his former school, and through his university. These include talking to students of all ages about the exciting, varied opportunities in electronics, in addition to his blog on the ECS pages, which relates his experiences as an electronics undergraduate.

On winning his award Adam commented: "I'm really delighted to have won this award as I know the competition was strong, especially from my fellow Southampton University and UKESF scholar Tom Dell. The UKESF scholarship has provided me with development opportunities that a student wouldn't normally have, such as working internationally with a world-class company, meeting industry leaders and receiving training in the softer, professional skills that aren't taught at university"

Dr Derek Boyd, NMI’s CEO, said: “As a founding partner of UKESF we have been delighted by the quality of the undergraduate students within the scholarship scheme. Adam is just one of an exceptional group of younger people and I expect to see him contribute greatly to our sector in the future.”

Rebecca Whatley-Stokes, Global Head of Learning and Development at Dialog Semiconductor, commented: “Adam has been fantastic during his time at Dialog, he’s a real credit to young engineers and will do very well in future. The UKESF has given us a great opportunity to spot the most talented individuals, such as Adam, earlier than our competition.”

Professor Neil White, Head of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, commented: 'Many congratulations to Adam on this very prestigious award, and also to Tom, the other finalist in the competition. We are immensely proud of our students' abilities and their enthusiasm as they look forward to contributing to the electronics industry. The fact that Southampton provided the two finalists in this inaugural Award underlines the environment in ECS, which is very much geared to producing the kinds of students that industry wants and needs in the future."

UKESF was founded in 2010 by collaboration of public bodies, private companies and UK universities to address the threat of a diminishing skills base in the UK electronics sector. Its principal aims are to increase and sustain the supply of industry ready graduate engineers and boost career take up in the industry, worth £23 billion per year to the UK economy.

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

Researchers from the ORCHID project will present their work on the use of computerised agents for home energy management and disaster responses this week at TechWorld, the UK's leading technology event.

A team led by Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Alex Rogers of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton has been invited to present a poster at TechWorld (16-17 November) which focuses this year on Energy & Environment + Digital Connected World.

The poster - 'Human-Agent Collectives: From Foundations to Applications', focuses on the ORCHID researchers' work on the new science of human-agent collectives, which is exploring how computerised agents can interact with humans. The poster is a contender for the TechWorld University Excellence competition prize, which will be announced on Thursday (17 November).

"Working with computerised agents presents a number of challenges," said Professor Jennings, ORCHID Director. "One aspect is looking at the balance between humans that decide everything and software that decides everything. Another is looking at how agents fulfil tasks and disband when they are complete, and we are also looking at how agents can be encouraged to act in ways that generate socially desirable outcomes."

ORCHID is approaching these challenges by blending expertise in statistical information processing and multi-agent systems with human-agent interaction.

The five-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with significant funding from its industrial partners, has applications in future energy systems, disaster management, and defence and security industries.

The project brings together over 60 researchers from a range of disciplines at the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR).

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

Twenty-four senior directors from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology visited ECS-Electronics and Computer Science last week to hear about the UK’s deployment of IPv6 from Dr Tim Chown, a leading expert in IPv6, the next generation of Internet address protocols.

Dr Chown has been an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which has been working on IPv6 since the mid-1990s. In preparation for the advent of IPv6, the work carried out by Dr Chown and his colleagues in ECS has ensured that IPv6 has been standardized and that operational experience has been fed into the development process. Today IPv6 support is available in almost all modern router and operating system platforms, including Windows 7, MacOS X and Linux.

The data network in ECS runs both IPv4 and IPv6 alongside each other, a method known as dual-stack, and many of the ECS public-facing services including web, mail and DNS are available via IPv6 as well as IPv4. The deployment in ECS has helped validate the IETF protocols and their implementations by showing that IPv6 can be run successfully alongside IPv4 in production networks.

In addition to hearing about this progress from Dr Chown, the Chinese delegation were also able to hear about advances in new technology for wireless communications from Professor Lie-Liang and Professor Lajos Hanzo of ECS. Professor Hanzo is involved in the UK-China Science Bridges R&D on Wireless Mobile Communications which has the ultimate goal of creating a UK-China Joint R&D Centre for Future Wireless Communication Networks, and is funded by the UK Research Councils to facilitate the collaboration of British and Chinese academic institutions. Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, UK Open Government Data Adviser, also spoke on the advances made in the provision of public data in the UK and throughout the world, enabling citizens to benefit from access to government and business data.

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For further information about this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 3212.

Only a few weeks after arriving in the University of Southampton from Mexico City to begin his undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Alejandro Saucedo was meeting David Cameron in 10 Downing Street at a reception that celebrated his skills in app-building.

Alejandro was one of three students from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science invited to Downing Street last week as part of their prize in the national competition run by the organization Silicon Valley Comes to the UK. The aim of the competition, which involved hundreds of students around the UK taking part in two-day ‘appathon’ events, was to design useful consumer apps using new open data from the Government on healthcare, education, and the environment.

Alejandro, along with his team members, Unmesh Gangadharan, an MSc student in ECS doing Web Technology, and Anthony Brown, in the first year of a degree in Electronic Engineering, won their award for 'The Emergency Button', an app which could save lives and reduce potential crises by enabling users to notify relatives in an emergency, or to provide essential information. The team had to make a video of their pitch as part of their entry to the competition.

“It was truly an honour for us to meet the Prime Minister,” said Alejandro, “and to have the opportunity to be inside 10 Downing Street. “My mother actually came from Mexico just for this award ceremony. We are really grateful for all the support we received from the University of Southampton and ECS during the competition.”

As part of their prize the ECS team had a mentoring session with Nicholas Heller, Director of EMEA Google, who offered advice on further development of the app.

“Our plan is to complete the main functionality of The Emergency Button, and upload it in the Android market as soon as we can,” said Alejandro. “However, to continue with our project any further, we would need support from an institution. My plan is to propose our project to organizations such as the NHS, insurance companies and even to the Government - during our visit to Downing Street, I had the honour to discuss our idea with the UK Health Secretary!”

As a further part of his prize, Alejandro will represent his team when 10 of the prizewinning app designers are taken on a visit to Silicon Valley in California next Spring.

The students were accompanied to London by Christopher Gutteridge, Web Projects Manager in ECS. who organized the University of Southampton Appathon, held in October and sponsored by ECS-Electronics and Computer Science and local company Snowflake Software.

Watch coverage of the reception on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15770190.

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