An interdisciplinary research programme spearheaded by computer scientists from University of Southampton has published a new book covering The Theory and Practice of Social Machines.

The new book, which was co-authored by Regius Professor of Computer Science Dame Wendy Hall, represents the fullest and most complete discussion of social machines to date.

Social machines are networks of people and devices at scale, with behaviour co-constituted by human participants and technological components. The book is the latest output of the SOCIAM project, which brought together experts from the University of Oxford, University of Southampton and University of Edinburgh.

It describes the set of tools and techniques developed within SOCIAM for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, considers the ethical issues relating to privacy and trust, and speculates on future research trends.

Read the full story here.

A national research software facility that is co-directed within the University of Southampton has been awarded £6.5 million to continue strengthening software practices that underpin the UK’s world-class research.

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) will build upon its work helping thousands of researchers across all disciplines through the funding boost from all seven of the UK’s Research Councils.

The Institute, which brings together a team of experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, will focus its new phase on the creation of self-supporting communities that will facilitate the adoption of better practices and the sharing of expertise across the entire research community.

Dr Simon Hettrick, SSI Deputy Director and Co-Director of the Southampton Research Software Group, says: “Around 70% of research relies on software and its use has become near ubiquitous across all disciplines. We broke new ground when we founded the Institute and our work over the last eight years has elevated the topic of software in research so it is now a priority issue for most, if not all, research stakeholders – and we’ve achieve this feat not just in the UK but around the world.

“This next phase of funding demonstrates the rapidly growing interest in the field. It allows us, over the next five years, to scale out our successful programmes to reach an even larger audience. This means more researchers following good software practices, which gives us an important edge in an ever more competitive research environment.â€?

Since 2008, the SSI has built a network of over 110 Fellows, published more than 80 guides read by over 250,000 people, organised more than 180 training events for over 4,500 learners, provided support to over 60 different research projects from across all research councils, and succeeded in the creation and advocacy of the Research Software Engineer role.

The University of Southampton supports the Institute through Simon’s input as Deputy Director and the participation of four Research Software Engineers and one Community Coordinator.

The new SSI phase has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC).

University of Southampton spinout AccelerComm has completed a £2.5 million funding round to deliver faster speeds in a wireless connected world.

The investment will scale further development and commercialisation of IP solutions that improve the latency, throughput and error correction of next generation communications.

The semiconductor IP spinout, launched from expertise in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has closed its latest round led by Bloc Ventures and IP Group.

AccelerComm’s LDPC, polar and turbo FEC technologies deliver error correction decoding that is required to overcome the effects of noise, interference and poor signal strength. This enables optimum performance for everyday devices such as phones and tablets that rely on 4G LTE, 5G New Radio (NR) and MIMO cellular communications where low power, small footprint and ultra-low latency are all key requirements.

Professor Rob Maunder, AccelerComm founder and Chief Technology Officer, said: “Flexibility is key to success when developing advanced communications and these high performance standardised architectures in the wireless infrastructure market are enabling that flexibility while helping to reduce development time.â€?

Engineers from the spinout are demonstrating their latest software-only IP for 5G NR in support of virtualised networks on the Great Britain and Northern Ireland stand of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week.

AccelerComm’s optimised polar coding chain is already in commercial use today in 5G NR products, less than eight months after a release of 5G NR specification was concluded by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).

Through this latest investment Bloc Ventures - which was founded by industry veterans from Arm Holdings and Vodafone - will take a seat on the AccelerComm board.

Tom Cronk, AccelerComm’s newly appointed CEO and former Arm executive, said: “This investment supports and underwrites our strategy to meet the demand in a growing wireless connected world for products that can increase communications performance without compromising on size and power.â€?

To find out more about the spinout please visit: www.accelercomm.com.