His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York, opened the 2012 Engineering and Technology Careers Fair, organized by ECS-Electronics and Computer Science for the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton.

The Duke of York toured the Fair, speaking to many of the companies present, finding out how they work with ECS and other university departments, and learning more about the skills they are seeking from top-level university graduates. He was keen to explore the technologies on display, from the touch screen technology developed by Atmel Technologies to the optical fibre-lasers of SPI Lasers. He was particularly interested in the flight simulation display on the Snowflake Software stand (pictured right). Speaking to Max Toti, Managing Director of Captec, and ECS graduate, Prince Andrew was particularly keen to discuss how universities and businesses together are contributing to the UK’s economic recovery through innovation in engineering and technology.

“It is a great pleasure to join you at the University of Southampton, which is globally renowned and a university of which the United Kingdom is extremely proud,” said His Royal Highness.

“The fact that the Careers Fair has grown to the size it is today – and is actually bursting at the seams – is a sign of how important this University is and how keen businesses are to come here and attract students to work for them.”

The Duke of York then led a roundtable discussion on entrepreneurship and employability with students and graduates joined by University Vice-Chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam, University Chancellor Dame Helen Alexander and Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences, Dame Professor Wendy Hall. ECS students Don Ndwiweni, Alejandro Saucedo, Adam Malpass and Tom Dell all took part in the discussion.

The visit concluded with a tour of the research facilities in the Mountbatten Building, where the Duke of York was able to learn about the Next Generation Internet Project led by the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and the graphene transistor developed in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre.

“It’s been a great privilege for us to be able to demonstrate how hard we work to transfer new knowledge and technology into the economy, and for His Royal Highness to meet with some of the employers who are especially interested in the talents of our highly skilled students,” said University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Don Nutbeam.

Well over 1000 students attended the Fair, held in the Garden Court, Highfield Campus. This year was the fifth Fair in the series, which began in 2008 with 22 companies present. Many ECS graduates were on the company stands, illustrating the strong links between ECS and some of the most innovative parts of UK industry. The full list of companies attending the Fair was:

Aardvark Swift, Accenture, ARM, Atmel Technologies, BAE Systems, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BBC Research & Development. Bloomberg, BT Security, Cambridge Silicon Radio, Captec, Centrica, Chamsys, Cisco Systems, Climax Studios, Contact Singapore, Corefiling, Critical Software Technologies, Deloitte, Detica, Dialog Semiconductors, EA Technology, Enterprise Recruitment, Ericsson Television, Estee Lauder, FactSet, FDM, Fidessa, GCHQ, Gloucester Research, Goldman Sachs, Gradcracker, Gresham Computing, HSBC, IBM, Imagination Technologies, JP Morgan, Keeler. KPMG, Logica, MatchTech, MicroFocus, NATS, NDS, Netcraft, NewVoiceMedia, Ocado, OpenMarket, PwC, Qualcomm, Roke Manor Research, Sagentia, Schlumberger, SELEX Galileo, Snowflake Software, SPI Lasers, STI, STR, Switch Concepts, TeachFirst, Telesoft Technologies, Telsis, Texas Instruments, Thales UK, Winton Capital Management, The Year in Industry

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

A new series of videos about undergraduate life in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton focuses on what our students say - about their coursework, the things they like (free cake) and maybe dislike (deadlines), the atmosphere in a School that combines Electronics and Computer Science, what they do outside their coursework, and what they plan to do when they leave.

The series of eight videos What ECS Students Say gives a great view of undergraduate life in ECS and shows how much our students value the experience they have here.

From the free cake, to the bright yellow decor of the Mountbatten Building, late-nights in the Lab, and the injustice of competing coursework deadlines, What ECS Students Say captures some of the most important elements of student life, but also looks forward to the future: "I think that my best memory of ECS will be all the people I've worked with through my projects and coursework and the friends from my course, because I know that they are people who are going to go on to do really great things in industry and it will be exciting to work with them in the future ... and if not, just to see what they do." (Adam Malpass, 'Best Thing About ECS?')

The full playlist is available on the ECS News Channel on YouTube:

Why did you Choose ECS? How hard are the Courses? What do you do Outside ECS? Best Thing about ECS? Worst Thing about ECS? What's the Atmosphere in the School Like? Plans for the Future? The One with the Out-takes ....

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

The Energy Harvesting Network is holding its annual one-day conference “Energy Harvesting 2012” on Wednesday 28 March, where it will announce details of the Energy Harvesting Open Access Data Repository. The repository is an online resource for researchers to share detailed data on energy availability and characteristics.

At present the data available for download include detailed vibration data from a variety of transport and machinery applications and these will be expanded to include data on wind, light irradiance and human-body motion. All data is contributed by the community, and researchers are encouraged to upload their data. All data is available for free download allowing researchers to compare and evaluate their energy harvesting designs and analysis using a common dataset. The repository can be viewed at http://eh-network.org/data

The ‘Energy Harvesting 2012’ event on 28 March provides a platform for disseminating energy-harvesting advances in the UK, and includes presentations from well-respected speakers from academia and industry, demonstrations from companies, and posters from postgraduate students. Registration costs £50 (a subsidised rate of £25 is available for academics), while PhD students who bring and present a poster can attend for free (there are only a few poster spaces left).

Speakers at the event include Professor Peter Woias (IMTEK, Germany), Frank Schmidt (CTO Enocean), Professor Vittorio Ferrari (University of Brescia, Italy), Roy Freeland (Perpetuum) and Professor Eric Yeatman (Imperial College, London). For further information and instructions on how to register, please visit http://eh-network.org/events/eh2012.php

The Energy Harvesting Network is managed by Professor Steve Beeby and Dr Geoff Merrett of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and was launched in March 2010. The Network is funded by the EPSRC, and aims to define new research challenges, facilitate interaction between researchers and industry, and to disseminate latest advances in technology.

Further information on the Energy Harvesting Network, including details of how to join for free, can be found at http://www.eh-network.org

This year’s Careers Fair continues to make waves! BBC Research & Development attended the Fair for the first time and have provided an account of the experience in their new blog. "Our virtual steadicam demo got the students’ attention and they were genuinely interested in how it worked, how it was developed and its potential applications in industry," writes Rosie Campbell.

The atmosphere of the Fair – held on 7 February and the biggest so far, with 66 companies and organizations represented – can also be gauged from our new video ECS Careers Fair 2012.

Many students who will be graduating from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science this summer already have jobs, but many are still considering their options, and new opportunities are being made available to students every day.

ECS students in the middle of their degree programmes are encouraged to do summer internships in companies relevant to their degree programmes, and many are now attending interviews with some of the country’s leading technology companies.

All vacancies notified to ECS are placed on our Careers Hub website which is available to students throughout the University.

Next year's Careers Fair will be held on Tuesday 12 February 2013.

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

International student Alejandro Saucedo had high expectations of his Computer Science course in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science when he arrived in Southampton last October … but they didn’t include visits to 10 Downing Street and to Silicon Valley, or a meeting with the Duke of York.

All of this has resulted from Alejandro’s participation in Silicon Valley Comes to the UK (SVc2UK), a national competition held last October at six of the UK’s leading universities. The appathon event involved students in using open government data to create innovative consumer applications in healthcare, education and the environment. Alejandro and his team-mates, ECS students Unmesh Gangadharan and Anthony Brown, won the Southampton event with their Emergency Button app, and were then invited to 10 Downing Street to meet the Prime Minister David Cameron, other Cabinet Ministers, and leading entrepreneurs. Alejandro’s mother, who had waved him off from Mexico City only a few weeks before, flew to London to witness the events!

In February Alejandro joined other ECS and University students to meet the Duke of York at the Engineering and Technology Careers Fair, to talk about student entrepreneurialism and how this can be fostered in a university course.

But the highlight of SVc2UK took place earlier this month when Alejandro, representing the Emergency Button team, joined other winners for a trip to Silicon Valley, California, and was able to tour some of its leading companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google, and to meet the entrepreneurs who have made Silicon Valley the hub of the global tech world.

“The atmosphere was incredible!”, says Alejandro. “The culture is amazing; everyone is extremely happy and enthusiastic towards their professional and personal life! They are constantly interacting with brilliant people with the desire to create and contribute!”

Taking part in SVc2UK has been inspirational for him, he believes: “The real objective of this competition was to find enthusiastic, entrepreneurial students, and show them the amazing entrepreneurial culture in the Valley, with the objective of making them go back with the desire of building this entrepreneurial culture in the UK - and I believe they succeeded!!”

Despite having experienced the incredible atmosphere of Silicon Valley, Alejandro is not convinced that he will aim himself there in the future and is happy to be based in Europe for the next few years: “Having the opportunity here to deal with so many languages, so many cultures, so many countries, I feel it wouldn't be smart to limit myself to a single continent when I have the opportunity to experience so much here! The competition organizers said that the entrepreneurial culture in the UK and Europe is still quite young, but still eager to grow!”

The SVc2UK event was sponsored in Southampton by ECS-Electronics and Computer Science and Snowflake Software.

Read Alejandro's Blog and his account of what he learned in Silicon Valley.

Since it was moved to its current site in 1991, the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory (TDHVL) has been a centre of research excellence for equipment and materials testing in the applications of power generation and transmission.

However, this year sees the addition of a new research area to the Laboratory, that of space electric propulsion which uses low temperature plasmas.

The research, being led by Professor Steve Gabriel and funded by the European Space Agency, consists of two projects looking into electrical methods of propulsion for satellites outside of atmosphere. The first of these concerns the development of a breadboard for a system of 6 Pulse Plasma Thrusters (PPTs) for low weight Nano Satellites. These systems would be used to adjust the orientation and position of the orbiting devices using a solid propellant, and therefore only requiring a relatively low amount of external power to function. This presents a clear advantage over gas or liquid propellant systems (which also pressurised require storage tanks etc.), added to their qualities of being modular and easy to scale. High voltages are needed to both initiate the discharge and for the main discharge of a capacitor bank across the surface of the Teflon propellant.

The second project is involved in the development of Hollow Cathode Thrusters (shown in the image), a research area in which the University of Southampton is already world-leading. Researchers are aiming to design a working model for the devices, and consequently using the facilities at the TDHVL to help validate its results experimentally. These new Thrusters create an opportunity to design geosynchronous telecomm satellites and similar capabilities with a single, all-electric method for in-orbit propulsion and orientation, in preference to more complicated current spacecraft with two separate systems at work.

The group of researchers led by Professor Gabriel will be working on these projects in collaboration with a number of external industrial companies, including Qinetiq and a number of spin-offs from previous work within the group. The working space has now been prepared for these investigations within the Laboratory, and so work is set to begin immediately.

For more information on Plasma and Space Technology research within the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, please contact Professor Steve Gabriel (email sgb2@soton.ac.uk; tel. 023 8059 3222).

A group of computer scientists from the UAE, US and UK have won a seemingly impossible worldwide challenge: to track down five ‘suspects’ of a jewel heist in five different cities within 12 hours. Their win redefines the limits of technology-mediated social mobilization and rapid information gathering.

Thee 'Tag Challenge', took place last month - a not-for-profit, independent event, aiming to “determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement goal.” With a $5,000-reward, it constituted a simulated law enforcement search in five cities, namely Washington DC, New York City, London, Stockholm and Bratislava in Slovakia. Sponsored by the US State Department and the US Embassy in Prague, the challenge was created by a group of graduate students from six countries.

On the morning of 31 March, the organizers posted on the website a “mug shot” of each suspect at 8:00am local time. Using this photo alone, teams competed to be the first to successfully locate and photograph all ‘volunteer suspects’ and submit verifiable photographs to the contest organizers before 8:00pm local time. The enormity of the challenge meant that no single person or group of friends could tackle it on their own. Instead, winning was expected to rely on the ability to assemble a very large, ad-hoc team of spotters. A group of computer scientists provided the tool to do just that.

The winning team, dubbed CrowdScanner was built by computer scientists from the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Southampton and University of California San Diego (UCSD). They located three targets in New York City, Washington DC, and Bratislava in Slovakia within the stipulated time. Two other teams were subsequently able to locate one suspect each, in New York and Bratislava. Suspects in Stockholm and London remained at large.

The team leader, Professor Iyad Rahwan of Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, said: “What is most fascinating about our success, in my opinion, is the fact that none of us resides in any of the five cities. We all coordinated everything from behind our computer screens. This, to me, is what is special about the Internet. Our next step is to try to reconstruct exactly how we won, and what happened on the day of the challenge, and to learn something about what makes social media work in such amazing ways.” Dr Rahwan added: “Back in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the legendary "six degrees of separation" experiment, which redefined our conception of social distance and taught us that everyone is only 6 steps away from everyone else on earth. The Tag Challenge is similarly redefining the limits of technology-mediated social mobilization and rapid information gathering. This has implications ranging from disaster response, to finding missing children, and much more.” Dr Victor Naroditskiy of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at the University of Southampton commented: “The TAG Challenge is a chance to study how information propagates through social networks and what it takes for a message to go viral. Our analysis of the data from the challenge is aimed at discerning general patterns that will help explain the successes and failures of social media in recent events.”

Members of the AIC group, led by Professor Nick Jennings in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, have been working together on the use of crowdsourcing in information-gathering over the last year, particularly as regards theoretical work on game theory and incentives. The global group included research contacts around the world, resulting in a balanced mix of practical and game-theoretic expertise.

Professor Jennings leads the ORCHID project, funded by EPSRC and industrial partners, which aims to establish the science needed to understand, build and apply human-agent collectives (HACs), with crowdsourcing one of the major technologies under investigation and study.

For more information on this story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

ECS-Electronics and Computer Science achieved excellent results in this year’s Complete University Guide, the first university league tables to be published this year.

Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Southampton was ranked second in the UK on a range of criteria that included student satisfaction, graduate job prospects, research, and entry standards. Below Southampton in the top five of this table (which was headed by Cambridge) were Imperial College London, University College London and Bristol.

Computer Science at Southampton was ranked fifth in the UK, sharing the top five places with Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College London, and Bristol. Engineering at Southampton did well across the board, achieving top ten places for all subject areas.

“We are delighted with this excellent showing in this year’s first university league table results,” commented Professor Neil White, Head of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science. “Students who come to ECS can be very confident that they will receive an excellent education, developing strong technical skills as well as being exposed to latest technologies through our research-based teaching.

“Our links with employers and the strength of our employability activities will also help ensure that ECS students have excellent opportunities to undertake internships during their course and to achieve outstanding graduate careers in the industries and sectors of their choice.”

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

A summer internship with local company Snowflake Software was the prize in a novel Code-Off event held in the ECS computer lab last Saturday (21 April).

The hotly contested event involved first and second-year Computer Science students, and saw many innovative approaches to the task, which was to visualize some OS MasterMap GML data from Ordnance Survey. The winner at the end of the day was first-year undergraduate Computer Scientist, Hendrik (Henco) Appel.

Ian Painter, Managing Director of Snowflake Software, comments: "OS MasterMap from Ordnance Survey is the most detailed map in the world – we’re talking hundreds of millions of map features. So firstly scalability in reading the data is very important. Henco’s selection of the SAX parser was a really good choice (especially given that he’d never used one before). Next up was displaying the data - to render OS MasterMap is no mean feat, so seeing some extensive use of Graphics2D was again a good choice. Finally, and what stood out the most for me, was Henco’s use of the attributes on OS MasterMap to enable the switching of the data themes. All in all Henco’s coding covered the three key areas: importing, displaying and interacting."

Henco says: “I quite enjoyed the Code Off - at first the task seemed insurmountable, but working up slowly I managed to create my program.

“First I started by trying to understand the structure of the GML data that I was given and to understand how the coordinate system worked. I then found the basis of a SAX parser which I modified to collect the coordinates and other information, such as the themes, to create a List of Objects from. Then using the coordinates in the List, I drew polygons using Java Graphics2D. I also enjoyed the pizza and chocolate!”

Henco will now spend his summer working for Snowflake Software in their Southampton offices on the 3D AIXM Viewer project that Snowflake jointly developed with the University of Southampton using NASA WorldWind.

ECS and Snowflake Software have built a strong relationship over the last year, including sponsorship of a Group Design Project, sponsorship of events, and involvement in the ECS employability activities. ECS encourages all its students to undertake summer placements during their degree programme and has a very active programme of engagement with high-quality employers to ensure our students have many opportunities to find excellent companies which will greatly enhance their experience and understanding of business and industry.

Read more about the Snowflake Code-Off on their website.

To find out more about how your company can work with ECS or for more information on this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

Third-year student Alex Levy has devised and built a new social network for the University of Southampton as part of his third-year project in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.

Learn Social provides a place for students to get coursework help, create private study groups and discuss course matters with their lecturers and coursemates, and has been designed with social interaction in mind.

“Current learning management systems don’t put enough emphasis on social interaction between students and their lecturers,” says Alex. “So when people sign up to Learn Social they are placed into ‘clusters’ – groups which are based on the modules they are taking on their degree programmes.

“This gives them a private area for discussing course issues, sharing useful links, or asking questions of their peers. It also creates a place for students to meet others on their course that they’ve not yet met.

“All users are able to create their own private clusters to use as they please.”

Watch our video to see Alex explaining the new site and demonstrating its innovative features:

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During this trial period there are three Amazon vouchers (£30, £20 and £10) to be won by the users who gain the highest reputation on the site.

Alex's project has been supervised by Dr Thanassis Tiropanis of the ECS Web and Internet Science group.

For more information on Learn Social contact Alex Levy.