Researchers from the University of Southampton will assess rapid diagnosis technologies and treatments against antibiotic resistant infections in new research laboratories at University Hospital Southampton.

The university-hospital partnership has won £2.8 million in funding for the facilities as part of a £32 million package awarded to ten sites nationally by the Department of Health and Social Care.

Experts from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will use the hub to continue their ground-breaking work developing rapid methods for detecting or diagnosing antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Overuse of antibiotics has driven anti-microbial resistance (AMR) - the emergence of bacteria and fungi strains immune to their effects, resulting in infections that kill over 5,000 people each year in the UK. That figure is rising year-on-year and globally there is concern that new strains may emerge that are resistant to all existing antibiotics.

University Hospital Southampton and the University of Southampton's Global Network for Anti-Microbial Resistance and Infection Prevention (UoS NAMRIP) will develop the state-of-the-art research facilities to tackle this threat on the frontline.

Professor Tim Leighton, Director of UoS NAMRIP, said: “This award is a huge achievement and we are extremely grateful to the Department of Health and Social Care. This is an enormous opportunity to close the loop of researchers working with end users to define the key problems and opportunities to address AMR, conduct ground-breaking research to address those, and then progress to end users who can ensure breakthroughs are translated out to benefit on a societal scale.”

Located at the heart of Southampton General Hospital, researchers at the laboratories will work directly with consultants and services including adult and children’s medicine, major surgery, infectious diseases and emergency care.

Southampton is already at the forefront of world-leading clinical research in infectious diseases through studies such as a pioneering use of genetically-modified harmless bacteria to dislodge strains that cause life-threatening meningitis by Professor Robert Read, Director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Southampton Biomedical Research Unit and lead applicant on the facilities award.

Professor Hywel Morgan and colleagues from ECS are developing a rapid 30-minute test to determine whether patient samples with a urine infection contains a resistant infection.

“The research builds upon work previously funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) which extracted the bacteria from the urine and then extracted the DNA from which we identified genes that tell us if the bacteria are resistant,” he explained.

“This research uses a digital microfluidic platform and is a collaboration with Public Health England (PHE). We are also developing a simple and rapid anti-microbial susceptibility test, AST for short, that can be used on any patient samples. This test looks at the direct response of the bacteria to an antibiotic to determine whether they are resistant or not.”

The pioneering work is done using electrical methods that analyses single bacteria in a population one by one, but very quickly. The current timeline for an AST is between 48 and 72 hours, however the ECS team have now demonstrated results in as short a timeframe as 30 minutes. The researchers have filed patents and are working with PHE to commercialise the technology.

World-leading experts taught data visualisation, code optimisation and machine learning techniques that could help solve some of science’s greatest questions at a summer academy for researchers at the University of Southampton.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Next Generation Computational Modelling (NGCM), hosted over 50 students from across the UK at this month’s week-long event on Boldrewood Innovation Campus.

The summer academy brings together PhD students and early career researchers who work on the computer simulation of science and engineering problems and want to extend their training with courses by key developers on relevant software tools.

Expert courses during the week included a two-day overview of machine learning delivered by Professor Mahesan Niranjan, Professor Adam Prugel-Bennett and Dr Jonathon Hare from Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Dr Andreas Jüttner, NGCM director, says: “Be it improving the aerodynamics of a Formula 1 car, designing new medicines that better penetrate a cell membrane in the human body or the question about what the universe looked like shortly after the Big Bang - computational modelling of the underlying physical or chemical processes is an indispensable tool that is driving progress at the forefront of all branches of scientific research.

“The complexity of the questions to be addressed is constantly increasing, requiring people able to harness ever stronger computing resources, develop new algorithms, data analysis and machine learning techniques, to further our understanding of nature and to improve the world we live in. The NGCM is training a new generation of researchers with the required skillset to address these questions.”

This month’s summer academy provided workshops in data visualisation techniques that can make data accessible and easier to understand, code optimisation that can make computer code run faster, theory and practical examples in the transformative discipline of machine learning and the increasingly important computing platform of coding Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

International experts Dr Prabhu Ramachandran from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, Adrian Jackson from the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre and Jony Castanga from the Science and Technologies Facilities Council delivered courses on VTK and Mayavi, Optimising Scientific Software and GPU programming using CUDA.

The NGCM provides a four-year PhD programme that consists of a year of taught material before students spend three years dedicated to a research topic. The CDT benefits from a dedicated physical space in Boldrewood Innovation Campus and an extended network of industrial and academic partners.

Researchers from the University of Southampton are testing strategies that will sustain and improve crowdsourced analysis of drone footage in humanitarian relief efforts.

Professor Elena Simperl from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is spearheading the new research project as it explores how to maintain crowd contributions after an immediate emergency has passed.

The experiment is a winner of the first wave of Collective Intelligence Grants from the Nesta innovation foundation, which seek to combine human and machine intelligence for social good.

Drones provide a cheap, fast and detailed means of capturing aerial images in disaster zones, especially when compared to helicopters and satellites. The analysis of this content can now be crowdsourced to people across the globe thanks to modern mobile technologies, enabling aid workers to coordinate recovery efforts effectively from the ground.

“High levels of media coverage can attract a lot of volunteers to analyse drone footage during an emergency, but the number of participants can drastically decrease once the media attention fades,” Elena explains. “This reduced participation can have a troubling impact on communities’ long term recovery, with less reliable data making it difficult to keep information up to date and assign resources in an effective manner.”

Southampton researchers have partnered with WeRobotics and Rescue Global for the project, which will draw conclusions that are relevant for all humanitarian relief, citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that struggle to maintain engagement.

Scientists will first explore strategies such as task variation and sequencing to test if they could sustain analysis in post-disaster and development scenarios. They will then investigate how experts and volunteers learn over time, acquiring skills and motivation to conduct more difficult analysis of drone footage.

Professor Gopal Ramchurn, of ECS, says: “We have a strong ethos of working with practitioners and co-creating research questions and tackling these questions with them. WeRobotics and RescueGlobal will be helping us validate the crowdsourcing techniques we will develop within the project, bringing to bear their experience deploying such platforms in the real-world.”

The Collective Intelligence Grants programme has received over 200 applications since its launch in September 2018, with researchers around the world proposing innovative approaches to solve social problems.

Twelve successful experiments have been announced in the programme’s first wave, with recipients as far as Hong Kong and San Francisco launching experiments ranging from the use of swarm algorithms based on bees and fish for groups with conflicting political views, through to crowdsourced airstrike images as digital evidence for legal practitioners in court.

A team of undergraduate students from the University of Southampton designed, tested and launched an autonomous can-sized satellite in an international competition with the American Astronautical Society.

Team Soton spent a year creating the ‘CanSat’ that could release an auto-gyro on a controlled 400-metre descent, while recording telemetry and transmitting it to a ground station.

The group, which included MEng Electronic Engineering student Adrian Kraft, trialled their design at a final in Stephenville, Texas, finishing as a top 20 entry despite facing technical difficulties during their launch.

The CanSat competition challenged the world’s undergraduates and postgraduates to produce a design that used an auto-gyro descent control for a science payload when released from a rocket, protecting its contents from damage during the launch and deployment.

Charlie North, Team Soton Leader, said: “The competition provided an exciting opportunity for the team to gain experience of an end-to-end life cycle of a complex engineering project. The team has enjoyed the whole experience and gained valuable skills that we will take into our respective careers.”

Team Soton designed their concept by dividing responsibilities into specialised subsystems, with Electronic Engineering’s Adrian Kraft focusing on electrical power and designing the electric circuits including the payload PCB, while MEng Aeronautics and Astronautics students Charlie North, Matteo Trombini, Dimo Iordanov, Roberto Holmes, Jake Trowbridge, Seren Moeketsi, Nikita Maksimov and Arshad Fasiludeen covered mechanics, flight software, descent control, data handling and sensors. Adrian also designed the team logo.

The team was supervised by the School of Engineering’s Professor Hugh Lewis and supported by Faculty funding and industry sponsors Aesir Space (Volante Global) and the ESL Group.

Around 100 teams from around the globe entered this year’s competition, with the top 40 teams invited to the launch weekend after a preliminary design review.

Team Soton were ranked seventh overall entering the Texas event with only two British teams qualifying. However they slipped to a final placing of 19th after unfortunately losing communication to the payload prior to take off which may have been related to software issues or damage to the power systems.

This summer’s competition was won by Turkey’s Istanbul Technical University. Turkish teams, who attract tens of thousands of pounds of sponsorship money, traditionally do very well in the CanSat competition and place highly every year.

An international research team including open data specialists from the University of Southampton have released a European knowledge graph that will boost procurement data analytics and decision making capabilities across the continent.

Researchers from the TheyBuyForYou project have integrated tender and company data to complete a first release of the open source knowledge graph for public procurement. As of the first quarter of 2019, the graph consists of over 23 million triples (records), covering information about almost 220,000 tenders.

Public procurement tenders amount to close to two trillion euros annually in the EU, making it critical that the market operates fairly and efficiently, supporting competitiveness and accountability. Data-driven insights can help make this happen, supporting buyers and suppliers alike in their decision making to enable a more open procurement landscape in Europe.

Professor Elena Simperl, Director of the Southampton Data Science Academy, explains: “Knowledge graphs bring together data from a variety of sources into a common format that can be easily extended and reused by organisations. By releasing the graph open source, we hope to encourage developers to use it in their own products and give us feedback on how we could improve it.”

TheyBuyForYou has built a technology platform in the first half of its three-year programme to visualise the comprehensive, cross-border and cross-lingual graph, which includes public spending and corporate data from multiple sources across the EU.

Dr George Konstantinidis, a data management expert in Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, adds: “Managing, integrating, interacting with, and providing analytics on top of procurement data is dependent upon reliable, and well-designed data infrastructure. The TheyBuyForYou knowledge graph is a coordinated effort to achieve these goals.”

TheyBuyForYou is supported by EU Horizon 2020 funding and brings together researchers, innovators and public administrations from five European countries. ECS researchers, including Yuchen Zhao, Laura Koesten and Tom Blount, are working on guidelines for procurement data visualisation, using interdisciplinary expertise to devise concepts and technologies that make the graph and its properties easier to understand and use.

The knowledge graph is compatible with standards in the procurement domain and is available here.