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.

Computing experts from the University of Southampton have published the latest progress in energy-efficient parallel computation in a new book with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

The book, which is edited by the School of Electronics and Computer Science’s Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Dr Geoff Merrett, includes the findings from a multi-million pound research programme investigating the management of power and reliability in future many-core mobile and embedded systems.

Many-Core Computing: Hardware and Software offers valuable insight for engineers, designers, architects and managers within academia and industry.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Engineering and Physical Sciences, said: “We have entered a significant and exciting age in computing, as the focus has moved away from performance-centric serial computation and towards energy-efficient parallel computation. This important new book draws upon findings from the Southampton-led PRiME Programme Grant, with most of the chapters either a direct result of research undertaken on this project, or else the collaborations and discussions that we had during it.”

PRiME collaborators held a focussed one-day workshop on many-core systems in 2018 from which the editors invited some of the distinguished speakers to contribute to the book.

Dr Geoff Merrett, Head of Southampton’s Centre for the Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems, added: “It was great to work with such a fantastic collection of international leaders in the field of many-core computing in order to bring this book together, and the result is an essential resource on the state and future of the field spanning hardware technologies all the way through to software systems.”

The new book opens with programming models, operating systems and their applications. The authors present runtime management techniques, followed by system modelling, verification and testing methods, and architectures and systems, before concluding with some examples of innovative applications.

PRiME brought together four UK universities and five companies with world-leading expertise in advanced electronics and computer systems, utilising £5.6m of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) between 2013 and 2018.

Researchers in ECS will continue to exploit some of the breakthroughs achieved through PRiME as part of a recently announced EPSRC International Centre on Spatial Computational Learning. The team will be investigating how to ensure that machine learning applications remain energy efficient and make best use of available hardware.

Software teams competed to design and implement 5G applications that deliver new media experiences in a hacking event from a consortium led by the University of Southampton.

The Urban Hacking in 5G event showcased the latest advances in 5G networking and technologies across four days at the University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab.

Participating teams, known as Hackers, were challenged to create inclusive, participative and entertainment experiences for the public.

The FLAME consortium is coordinated by Professor Michael Boniface, Head of the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, and is working with 12 partners across six countries to deliver a ground-breaking media delivery platform.

Read the full story here.

Researchers from the University of Southampton are re-thinking machine learning architectures and algorithms for future intelligent devices as part of a new Centre for Spatial Computational Learning.

The international collaborative research centre has secured over £1.2m of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to tackle challenges associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous computing’s increasing need to embed intelligence into devices.

The new Centre is led by Imperial College and involves collaborators in Southampton, Toronto and California, alongside industrial partners at Arm, Imagination Technologies, Xilinx, Corerain, and Maxeler Technologies.

Experts from Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, including Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Dr Geoff Merrett, will focus on energy-efficient computation for intelligence.

Read the full story here.

Four past and present students from the University of Southampton have been named among the most talented young electronic engineers in the country in the BrightSparks 2019 awards.

Emma Curati-Alasonatti, Nathan Ruttley, Louisa Smith and Ricki Tura were honoured in Electronics Weekly’s (EW) 2019 cohort in a ceremony at the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Maxwell Library in London.

The students are all present of former UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) scholars through a scheme available to Southampton undergraduates as a partnered university.

Stewart Edmondson, UKESF CEO, said: “We are delighted to congratulate the four scholars who made the list this year. This is a fantastic result; double the number selected in 2018. We are extremely proud of the quality and high calibre of the students that join our undergraduate Scholarship Scheme – one of the reasons the value of the scheme is increasingly recognised by companies right across the electronics sector – and it is heartening when they receive public recognition.”

Fourth year Electrical and Electronic Engineering student Ricki Tura was commended for creating a document generating tool that reduces the amount of errors in IP documentation plus his dedication to growing the popular Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS). The current UKESF scholar, sponsored by UltraSoc, was also recently named the UKESF Scholar of the Year at this winter’s TechWorks Awards.

Electronic Engineering graduate Emma Curati-Alasonatti, now at Arm, was recognised for a recent project focused on hardware vulnerabilities as well as her devotion to running after school code clubs for primary school children. The success comes just months after she also scooped a TechWorks Award, having been named Young Engineer of the Year.

Fellow Electronic Engineering graduates Nathan Ruttley and Louisa Smith were UKESF scholars from 2014 to 2016 and 2011 to 2014 respectively. Nathan, now of RPD International, was honoured for his leadership on a smart home radiator valve, while Robogals Southampton co-founder Louisa, now of Imagination Technologies, was celebrated for her work on a complex module that controls the scheduling and resourcing of a graphics processing unit.

Dr Geoff Merrett, Associate Professor at the University, said: “It’s great to see so many of our current and recent students recognised in this year’s awards, and this is a testament to their outstanding quality, drive and ambition. It’s heartening to see how their careers are developing, and their trajectories towards becoming the industry’s future leaders.”

The EW BrightSparks 2019 awards were presented by TV journalist Steph McGovern and included an inspirational address from Katie Cresswell-Maynard, Chief Executive of Engineers Without Borders, on how engineers can make a positive impact around the world.