BAE System Detica ran a very successful ‘Capture the Flag’ event for students in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science earlier this month.

Focusing particularly on cyber security challenges, the day-long event in the Mountbatten Building provided the opportunity for students to test their ability to break into vulnerable websites, crack ciphers, undertake forensic searches, and do some reverse engineering. The challenges required the usual operating systems to solve, but also tools such as WireShark, Netcat, JP Seek, Strings, and 7zip. Members of the Detica Special Systems team, including a number of ECS graduates, were around all day to provide hints and tips on the challenges and discuss careers in cyber security and software engineering in BAE Systems Detica.

The event was held in association with DevECS, the student development activity.

ECS is one of eight designated academic Cyber Security Centres in the UK, and our undergraduate degrees feature specializations in Mobile and Secure Systems.

This year's reception for ECS alumni of all years will be held in London on Tuesday 21 May from 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm.

Invitations to the event were issued last week to all ECS alumni for whom the University has current email addresses. The reception is again being held at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Savoy Place, and offers the opportunity for former students of Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and IT, to reconnect with each other, and to find out more about recent developments in ECS.

The 2012 event provided a great opportunity for ECS alumni over 60 years to meet and renew contact in the IET’s Riverside Room, with its wonderful balcony view of the Thames. “The event last year exceeded all our expectations”, said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS. “There was an outstandingly positive atmosphere in the room and it was really great to see so many old and new connections being made.”

Since then, a student mentoring programme has been initiated which draws on the knowledge and expertise of alumni, and business employability and enterprise support for students has also been introduced. ECS now has 12 student societies which are all keen to engage with alumni, and representatives of all the societies will be at the reception - alumni are invited to catch up with friends, network with fellow ECS graduates, and meet ECS academic staff, current students, and the University’s Alumni Relations team over drinks and canapés! For further information about this event, or to find out more about the ECS Careers and Employability initiative and ways of being involved, contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453; email j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk

An interactive rhino that responds to faces, tweeting and touch is set to take to the streets of Southampton this summer as part of a project involving the University of Southampton and Marwell Zoo.

Students and staff from Electronics and Computer Science have adopted the life-sized model rhino from Marwell Zoo as part of the zoo’s Go! Rhino scheme to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

They are now bringing Erica the Rhino to life, fully customising her and equipping her with a range of digital features. When she moves to the city centre this summer she will be able to respond to and interact with passers-by in a variety of ways including moving her ears and eyes and making sounds. She will also be able to engage in social networking and converse with bystanders and fans through twitter.

Go! Rhino is an initiative run by Marwell Zoo that will see a number of rhino sculptures inhabiting the streets of Southampton showcasing the wealth of artistic talent in the area while highlighting the significant conservation threat facing wild rhinos.

“There will be a number of rhinos living on the city streets this summer but Erica will stand out as she is the only one that will be able to interact with people that visit her,” said project coordinator Dr Kirk Martinez, from the University’s Web and Internet Science research group.

“This is an excellent opportunity to showcase some of the state-of-the-art technology that is being developed here at the University. We are currently working hard at adapting Erica so that she can fully interact with passers-by this summer and look forward to unveiling her in the very near future,” he added.

Students from the University’s Management School are also involved in the project to raise the profile of Erica. They have created, promoted and are now daily managing a twitter, youtube, facebook and instagram profile and have also developed and are maintaining a blog to broadcast the project's development.

The University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) department has been recognised for its work tackling the problem of gender inequality in science with an Athena SWAN Bronze Award.

The Athena SWAN Charter was set up in 2005 and acknowledges the commitment of the higher education sector to address gender inequalities, tackle the unequal representation of women in science and to improve career progression for female academics.

ECS joins other University departments including Chemistry, Medicine and Ocean and Earth Science to receive the bronze award this year. The University of Southampton has received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award since 2006.

The national achievement recognises the work ECS has done to ensure women are encouraged into an area that historically has been dominated by males.

For the past six years ECS has been committed to promoting diversity across its courses and staff. A Diversity Committee has been set up to encourage a supportive and inclusive environment for work and study. This Committee has already supported a number of activities including diversity training and career coaching for women.

ECS for Women has also been started by students to support women across all levels in from undergraduate to research to academic staff. The group takes an active part in conferences promoting females in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, and organises events focusing on employability improvements such as self confidence building, CV and interview workshops, and networking meetings

Head of ECS Professor Neil White said: “We are delighted to have achieved the Athena SWAN Bronze Award that acknowledges our commitment to address the gender imbalance in science subjects. We have recognised for some time that our fields of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are heavily male-dominated. The lack of women at all levels means we are not benefitting from the talents of the broadest cross-section of society and therefore not achieving our full potential.

“We have already put measures in place to counteract this. We have started being more systematic about ensuring female representation in key decision-making processes, are more comprehensive in our training and mentoring, and encourage a flexible work culture that enables good work life balance. We are also more proactive about encouraging women researchers from ECS and elsewhere to apply for open positions.”

Professor Michael Butler, Chair of the ECS Athena SWAN Team, added: "Applying for Athena SWAN was a team effort. We appreciate that this is only the start and we still have a long way to go. We have drawn up a plan of action detailing how we will continue our efforts to tackle this problem, how we aim to play a leading role in equality at University level, and how we can share our experiences with other science and engineering departments at Southampton.”

The Athena SWAN award will be presented at a special ceremony at The Royal Society of Edinburgh, in Scotland, in June.

PROV, a worldwide specification for provenance of information on the Web, has reached a key milestone, with the publication of a standard thanks to the work of an international group led by a University of Southampton professor.

Professor Luc Moreau, from Web and Internet Science in Electronics and Computer Science, is co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provenance working group that has defined a standard for provenance on the Web.

Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

The PROV standard will provide the structure of a computer-processable audit trail that is capable of describing the origins of information. This audit trail will help people understand where their information has come from and whether it can be trusted.

W3C is an international community that sees organisations, staff and public working together to develop Web standards. It was founded by the inventor of the World Wide Web and University of Southampton Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and aims to lead the Web to its full potential. The group has just published 12 documents to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources.

As part of the progression to Recommendation they catalogued 66 applications, some of which are interesting academic examples, others very practical. One particular application is NASA's use of PROV to provenance-enable the National Climate Assessment, a four-yearly compilation of findings related to climate change. Using this provenance, users will be able to trace the sources of information used in the assessment and therefore make trust decisions.

Professor Moreau says: “The W3C Provenance working group has worked very hard to develop a standard for provenance on the Web. It is important that a standard for provenance is developed because it will help users determine whether they can trust data and documents on the Web. On the Web, where information is mashed up and republished, where we can trust some sources more than others, provenance will allow users to decide whether information is authentic.”

For more information about the W3C PROV working group Standard in full go to: http://www.w3.org

A national collaboration of electronic engineers and computer scientists is aiming to develop the next generation of energy-efficient computing systems.

PRiME: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems, brings together four world-leading research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Imperial College, Manchester and Newcastle. The five-year £5.6m Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project will undertake creative research into the design and implementation of energy-efficient and dependable embedded systems with many-core processors.

Many-core processing - computer systems with hundreds of microprocessors - has applications in embedded, mobile, general-purpose and high-performance computing, and is widely recognised as the future of computing.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. and Director of PRiME, says:

“Electronics and software have a tremendous impact on life, from the internet to consumer electronics, healthcare and transportation. Embedded systems, many of which will be low-power mobile devices, will be one of the most powerful tools in tackling global societal challenges.

“Our vision is to enable the sustainability of many-core systems by preventing the uncontrolled increase in energy consumption and unreliability through a step-change in design methods and cross–layer system optimisation.”

A key component of PRiME is the close connection and interplay between world-leading research and the involvement of industry to identify and translate technology outcomes from this programme to commercial exploitation quickly and efficiently.

The UK electronics industry is worth £23 billion a year and is the fifth largest in the world. Within embedded systems, the UK is the world-leader thanks to the presence of ARM Ltd and Imagination, both collaborators on this proposal, as well as software and embedded system companies (e.g. Microsoft Research, Freescale and Altera). This research is essential in enabling industrial collaborators to compete in the future many-core market.

Professor Al-Hashimi adds:

“Architectures, software methods and tools, and highly-skilled scientists and engineers that will enable the design of future high-performance many-core embedded systems will be a huge part of future value and wealth creation. To maximise impact, suitable industrial and knowledge-transfer collaborators have been carefully identified that are best placed to influence and exploit the research.”

PRiME will also develop the next generation of researchers and leaders by exposing investigators, research fellows and PhD students to a highly stimulating environment, in which research is expected to be both world-leading in terms of academic quality and also have industrial relevance. Research results will be disseminated through high impact publications, workshops, and invited talks at major international conferences.

For more information about PRiME, please visit: www.prime-project.org

HackaSoton's latest event - a very successful StartUp Weekend - was sponsored by Bloomberg as part of their support for young entrepreneurs.

The event took place in the ECS Mountbatten Building over the Bank Holiday weekend earlier this month. With participants coming from as far away as Newcastle to take part, there was no shortage of ideas. The organizing team, Computer Science students Alejandro Saucedo, Izidor Flajsman, and Ali Amuzadeh, also provided two 3D printers to stimulate innovation even further.

A full account of the event can be found on the Hackasoton website.

The pinata (pictured) played an important part in the event by helping to launch the Weekend but also to demonstrate the value of imagination in pitching. Indeed successful pitching played an important part in the event, as well as consumer testing, innovation, and market knowledge. The keynote was given by well-known entrepreneur, Caleb Storkey.

HackaSoton is a community of skilful and passionate software, hardware and mechanical engineers who look for constant improvement by putting their knowledge in practice through great entrepreneurial, technical and engineering competitions, conferences and events.

People living in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster can find out the radiation level in their area thanks a new tool designed by a team of researchers from the ECS research group Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group (AIC).

The Japan Nuclear Crowd Map (JNCM) intelligently combines crowdsourced nuclear radioactivity data that has been collated since the 2011 emergency when a magnitude nine Tsunami hit the North-East coast of Japan severely damaging the nuclear power plant of Fukushima-Daiichi.

More than 488,000 people were evacuated from their homes when radioactivity in the area increased by up to 1,000 times the normal level. The disaster prompted private individuals to deploy 577 Geiger counters across the country to help monitor the spread of the nuclear cloud. Recently this network was extended to another 1,023 sensors and together they have provided more than 27 million readings since the Fukushima disaster.

The JNCM platform combines all the data collected from these resources into a single database that can help users find out the radioactivity level in their area.

Matteo Venanzi, a PhD student and member of AIC, said: “The platform automatically collects raw radiation data from the online sensors and fuses the data into a single radiation map over Japan. The estimates are then shown to the users as a heat map and an intensity map, showing the average radioactivity in each area.

“Users can also search by postcode to find out the radioactivity in their neighbourhood based on the latest predictions.”

JNCM is also available for smartphones as an Android app, allowing the user to find out the radiation level at their current location and to download the radiation heat map directly onto their phone as the data is collected.

Yuki Ikumo, from AIC, who developed the JNCM Android app, said: “JNCM aims to be one of the future technologies for disaster management in which the mass participation of people will play a crucial role in community-based crowdsourcing of environmental monitoring tasks.”

The JNCM platform was developed by AIC researchers as part of the ORCHID project, based in ECS, that investigates how human and software agents can work effectively together to collect the best possible information from a disaster environment.

To find out more about the JNCM platform visit http://jncm.ecs.soton.ac.uk or download the JNCM app from Google play.

To find out more about AIC visit www.aic.ecs.soton.ac.uk

To find out more about the ORCHID project visit www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/765

Our on-going programme to enhance facilities in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory has recently led to the commissioning of a new climate controlled facility to join our Salt-Fog chamber and Faraday Cage.

The temperature and humidity chamber has been the latest acquisition of the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory (TDHVL). A European Union grant, EU FP7 SPABRINK, recently aware will involve using the temperature and humidity chamber.

It has a temperature range of up to 50°C with relative humidity variation from 10% to 80% making it capable of simulating a great majority of climates. Currently it is being used commercially for sample pre-conditioning, thermal resistance tests and safety clothing testing. The working space area of 3.6m2 in combination with the versatile feedthrough panel allows electrical tests to be conducted under strict environmental conditions.

An industrial collaborative work with Wolfson Electrostatic is also planned to test some powder handling equipment (sieves, tubing, tools etc) for safe use in Zone O flammable atmospheres, to the European Standard EN13463-1 (Non-electrical equipment for potentially explosive atmospheres). The test involves artificially generating the maximum surface charge density on the test piece and then quantifying the magnitude of the resultant ESD’s using an electrical test probe. The standard requires testing at controlled temperature and low humidity conditions (23C, 30%RH).

The Environmental\Salt-Fog chamber, which conforms to the latest British standards for wet tests (IEC60060), has also just been refurbished to increase its efficiency and set-up time. It is currently capable of simulating fog and rain with a temperature range of up to 30°C, using voltages up to 80kV at 1Amp and also switching impulse tests of up to 200kV. Over the past decade it has been used extensively for commercial testing of switchgear, bushings and cable terminations.

The Faraday Cage which has been within the lab since its beginning completes the set of large control chambers available at the TDHVL. The working space area of 3.75m2 and its ability to attenuate electro-magnetic noise by approximately 80db has made it ideal for partial discharge research projects as measurement sensitivity is around 200fC. It is also used for highly sensitive measurement experiments such as conductivity measurements of impurities in insulating transformer oils.

There was a great atmosphere at this year’s ECS Alumni Reception, held in London on Tuesday 21 May.

Around 280 alumni attended the event from over 50 years of ECS history, and the lively atmosphere in the IET’s Riverside Room continued throughout the evening and even after the event had officially ended!

‘We were really delighted that so many ECS alumni came along to support the event and to reconnect with fellow students and hear about recent developments in ECS’, said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS. ‘It was great to hear about their success in different fields, and also to have many offers of support for our current students.’

Professor White told the alumni that their support was invaluable to student activities in ECS, enabling student development projects, the establishment of student societies – many of which were represented at the reception by current students, and the creation of new mentoring programmes. Alumni also play a large part in the ECS Careers Hub activity by offering internships and graduate jobs to ECS students, by bringing their companies to the annual Careers Fair, and by taking part in the programme of student careers conferences.

‘One of the great things about ECS that everyone comments on is the strength of the community,’ Professor White said in a short address at the reception. ‘We are very proud of our students and we take great pleasure in the success and influence that our graduates achieve in the world after ECS and the University of Southampton. We are delighted to have your support to help us continue to build the strength of the ECS community in the future.’

See photos of the event on our flickr Photostream.

For further information on ECS alumni events contact Joyce Lewis, ECS Senior Fellow (tel. 023 8059 5453).

Join our LinkedIn Group: 'ECS Alumni, University of Southampton'