An open-source Web application which transforms learning for all students, devised and developed in ECS by Dr Mike Wald, has won the title of 'ICT Initiative of the Year' in the annual awards ceremony for UK universities run by Times Higher Education.

The award to Synote was presented in London last night (24 November) and ends a year in which Synote has been recognized around the world for its innovation and the new opportunities it brings to students and learning, particularly disabled students.

Synote has been developed over a numbers of years in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. It makes multimedia resources 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 synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.

"Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers,’ says Dr Wald. ‘Synote actually provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording."

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. The programme has a whole range of useful features. It enables learners or teachers to read and search text transcripts and slides and replay recordings to support learning style preference, deafness, disability or English as a second language; to bookmark, tag and highlight and link to or from sections of recordings for indexing, revision, clarification or feedback; and to collaboratively annotate recordings with notes and URLs of related resources.

Synote can play most audio and video formats on most browsers and computers. Evaluations have shown that students like using Synote, find the synchronised transcripts and note-taking facility useful and want more recordings and lectures to be available in this way.

Synote has been developed with the support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

In a further initiative, Synote has 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.”

"This is wonderful recognition for an initiative which really gets to the heart of how ICT can be used and developed to make a real difference to people's lives," said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University. "The team led by Mike Wald has been working on Synote for a number of years, in parallel with other technologies, which are open source - so available to everyone, and which improve the quality of the educational experience in many different ways. Synote has been particularly successful and welcomed by different communities around the world, leading to a series of awards of which this is the latest."

"It is great to get such important recognition for the fantastic work of Southampton's staff and students who have contributed to Synote's development," added Dr Wald.

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

A lecture to be given on campus this week tells the fascinating story behind the most intriguing Jeopardy! challenge so far ....

Earlier this year an IBM computer took part in the well-known US tv quiz show and beat the best contestants of all time.

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.

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. In this lecture Dr 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. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.

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

ECS Professors Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been named as co-directors of a new world-leading Open Data Institute, established by the UK Government to innovate, exploit and research Open Data opportunities.

The new Institute will be based in Shoreditch, the newly designated 'Tech City UK' area of London, where there is a huge concentration of Web 2.0 start-ups, and it will involve business and academic institutions.

The Open Data Institute is intended to help demonstrate the commercial value of public data and the impact of open data policies on the realisation of this value. The Institute will also help develop the capability of UK businesses to exploit open data opportunities, with support from University researchers. It will help the public sector use its own data more effectively and it will engage with developers and the private and public sectors to build supply chains and commercial outlets for public data. The Government is to commit up to £10m over five years to support the Open Data Institute through the Technology Strategy Board - in a match-funded collaboration with industry and academic centres.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI, said: “One of the reasons the Web worked was because people reused each other’s content in ways never imagined by those who created it. The same will be true of Open Data. The Institute will allow us to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using Open Government Data.”

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI said:

“Data is the new raw material of the 21st century and the UK is world-leading in the release of Open Government Data. Open Government Data not only increases transparency and accountability but also creates economic and social value. The Institute will help business to realise this value and foster a generation of open data entrepreneurs.”

The new Institute is one of a number of measures that the Government announced today as part of a larger initiative to boost UK economic growth.

A working robot controlled by a slime mould, and designed and built in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will play a starring role in a major BBC4/Discovery Channel series to be aired from tomorrow (Tuesday 6 December).

Afterlife - The Strange Science of Decay, uses time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.

Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by. But as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

One aspect of the series shows the sometimes surprising ability of moulds to react to external stimuli. Earlier this year the production team spent a whole day in ECS, filming with Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner and Dr Soichiro Tsuda, who developed the slime-mould robot. Its central innovation is that its movements are controlled by a biochip which encapsulates a plasmodial cell of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. An electronic interface enables the slime-mould cell to be connected to a computer in order to monitor local mechanical oscillations in the cell and it also provides stimulation for the slime-mould through light signals, causing the movement of the robot.

Dr Tsuda told the programme presenter, Dr George McGavin, that his inspiration for the robot had come from Dr Who’s Daleks! ‘It’s amazing that something that lives on dead trees can be used to control a machine,’ said Dr McGavin.

Physarum polycephalum has been used by Dr Zauner in research projects which have included both research students and undergraduates in ECS over a number of years: Gareth Jones, now a PhD student in ECS, developed the drive system of the robot in his Part III project and ECS Electronics graduate Paul Macey developed the interface to the slime-mould cell in his Part III project.

Klaus-Peter commented “There was a time when people in hot-air balloons looked at pigeons and realised that there is a radically different solution to the problem of flight. Now we marvel at nature's molecular computers which tell us that there are radically different solutions to the problem of information processing.

‘To harvest the potential of molecular computing, however, we need a generation of engineers with a broad concept of computation - I am therefore particularly pleased that the most important component of this robot was developed by an undergraduate, Paul Macey.”

Physarum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood.

‘Afterlife’ will be shown on 6, 7, and 9 December. It will examine many different aspects of decomposition and decay, including the complexity of organisms that are associated with decomposition, as well as exploring our attitudes to bacteria and the breakdown of bio-systems.

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

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An energy quiz which tests people's knowledge of the amount of energy used by devices and processes, such as lights on the Christmas tree, has been developed by researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton.

A team led by Dr Alex Rogers of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group developed The Energy Quiz for BT. The "game with a purpose" is intended to challenge BT employees to test their knowledge about energy.

The online quiz invites players to compete by answering 12 questions about energy comparisons. For example, it asks: which uses more energy - a Christmas tree with 100 lights continuously lit over the festive period or a dishwasher used once a week for month; or it compares heating water for a typical office for a year with a full Boeing 747 flying 400 miles; or heating a typical office for a day versus driving a car 100 miles.

BT has invited 200 employees to play the game and will roll it out to a further 3,500 in the next phase. “For us this is a way of conserving energy and we are finding that there is a deficiency of knowledge about energy among our employees,” said Simon Thompson, BT Chief Researcher. “We have also found that this kind of knowledge is often dull for people and they are not too interested in the statistics, so if we can encourage them to play a game around energy, it makes it more fun.”

According to Dr Rogers, The Energy Quiz can be tailored to specific work or home environments. With the release of an updated version worldwide this week, he plans to analyse the data to explore people’s misconceptions about energy.

“Our informal results so far show that people have a lot less intuition about energy than you would think,” he said. “People think that home consumption is always higher than driving their car to work and they often assume that appliances in the foreground that make a lot of noise or generate heat use more energy over the course of a year than something hidden away in the background.”

The Energy Quiz is one of a whole host of tools to monitor energy being developed at ECS. Dr Rogers and his team have also developed a range of tools to visualise the real-time carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid and they have developed tools for building energy monitoring. They are also developing computerised agents that can negotiate the charging of electric-powered cars in the most efficient way.