The University of Southampton has awarded an Honorary Doctorate to Professor Bertil Andersson, President and Vice-Chancellor of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), during its 2016 Winter Graduation ceremonies.

Professor Andersson, a world-leading academic who has demonstrated excellent leadership in higher graduation, described his fellow graduands as “the heroes of the dayâ€? after receiving his Honorary Doctor of Science degree from University Pro-Chancellor, Jon Sopel.

“To receive this doctorate is a tremendous honour and privilege,â€? said Professor Andersson. “More importantly, it is a recognition of the high regard that the University of Southampton has for NTU Singapore, and a testament to the close relationship between both institutions. The NTU-Southampton collaboration is an excellent example that knowledge sees no borders in today’s world. “We share the same high ambitions to create new knowledge and apply it for the benefit of Singapore and the United Kingdom,â€? he continued. “We are collaborating in the exciting field of photonics and aim to use it for industrial innovations and breakthroughs for the good of both countries.â€?

Professor Sir Christopher Snowden, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton said, “We are pleased to award an Honorary Doctorate to Professor Andersson. His strong stewardship of NTU’s global partnerships and continued support of collaboration between NTU and the University of Southampton has led to successful global research and development initiatives like the S$100m Photonics Institute established at NTU with Southampton that is one of the most advanced centres of its kind in the world.â€?

A world-renowned Swedish plant biochemist, Professor Andersson is a pioneer of photosynthesis research who has authored more than 300 papers with over 14,000 citations. Since becoming President of NTU Singapore in 2011, he has led the University to global distinction. NTU is the world’s fastest-rising young university and is ranked first among the world’s young universities. It also leads the top Asian universities in normalised research citation impact. In the 2016 QS World University Rankings, NTU is ranked 13th globally.

Southampton’s 10 winter ceremonies featured around 1,000 graduating students from a wide range of subjects, including over 300 from Electronics & Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre within the University's Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering.

Pictured above are: Top row (l-r) - Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering; Professor Mark Spearing, Vice-President (Research and Enterprise). Bottom row (l-r) - Professor Sir David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre; Professor Bertil Andersson, President and Vice-Chancellor of Nanyang Technological University; University Pro-Chancellor, Jon Sopel.

An interdisciplinary research network, supported by expertise from the University of Southampton, has been recognised with a World Technology Award for its work developing sensor technologies to manage long term health conditions.

SPHERE - a Sensor Platform for HEalthcare in a Residential Environment – brings together researchers from the universities of Southampton, Bristol and Reading to build a picture of how we live in our homes to identify medical or well-being issues.

The project was celebrated by the World Technology Network with an award in the Health and Medicine category at a Los Angeles ceremony on Thursday, 8 December.

The University of Southampton is contributing research to the project in the areas of Electronics and Electrical Engineering and Health Sciences.

Professor Steve Beeby, Electronics and Computer Science Lead for the project, said: “As the UK is faced with a rise of long term health issues and healthcare costs, it is imperative that we use new technologies to answer these problems. We are working closely with clinical researchers in the Faculty of Health Sciences, led by Professor Ashburn, as well as partners at Bristol and Reading; it is fantastic to see this interdisciplinary research being rewarded with an international honour.â€?

SPHERE has received £15m of investment to date, including a £12m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The project involves a community of close to 100 researchers working with clinicians, engineers, designers and social care professionals as well as members of the public to develop new technologies. Sensor networks could provide help in outputs including the characterisation of sedentary behaviour, the correlations between factors such as diet and sleep, and the analysis of eating behaviours.

The World Technology Awards are presented each year to individuals & organizations - outstanding innovators from each sector within the technology arena, conducting innovative and impactful work with the greatest likely long-term significance in the fields of science, technology & other related disciplines.

A team of Web and Internet Science (WAIS) researchers, from Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, has been working with statistical colleagues at the Centre for Multilevel Modelling, University of Bristol, to develop new software technology that allows UK students and young researchers to access reproducible statistical research.

Stat-JR is an online universal gateway to many specialised statistical packages that provides tools to help users learn about statistical methods and how they can be implemented.

WAIS researcher Dr Danius Michaelides was part of the Southampton team in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project that explored how to extend Stat-JR to better support reproducibility.

Danius said: “We have integrated workflows into Stat-JR to better support complex statistical analyses. Also, when researchers are using Stat-JR, we record their actions in the form of provenance traces. These traces can be turned into workflows so that the analyses can not only be rerun but also be edited and reused.

“When used in conjunction with Stat-JR's e-book system it allows other researchers and students to adopt and adapt complex analyses for their own research.â€?

The three-year project has seen the team building tools to support reproducibility. Professor Luc Moreau, who led the work in Southampton, said: “Provenance is a key technology in supporting reproducible research and with this project we've explored how best to use provenance to improve the Stat-JR tools.â€?

To find out more about Stat-JR visit www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/software/statjr.

An award-winning Southampton software tool to make university lectures more accessible, has been launched as a spinout company to help address government cuts in the Disabled Student Allowance.

Recorded lectures are a valuable resource for students, but finding specific information within videos can be a frustrating task as, unlike textbooks, videos don’t have a contents page, page numbers or sections.

Synote provides a low cost, accurate captioning system that can unlock the value of multimedia by creating synchronised online and paper notes and transcripts.

The web-based annotation tool was developed by Professor Mike Wald and web developer Dr Yunjia Li, from Southampton’s Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), to make it easier to access, search and manage multimedia resources.

Synote can be used alongside any lecture recording system and helps students gain maximum benefit from their lectures by flexibly combining, synchronising and searching these recordings, transcripts, slides, images and notes.

Synote Director Mike, who leads the University’s ECS Accessibility Team, said: “Every year in the UK, millions of hours of videos are generated from university lectures but hardly any are captioned. Students’ notes can miss 80 per cent of information delivered at lectures, so Synote’s low cost, accurate captioning system can make university courses more accessible and help boost academic performance benefitting all students, especially disabled and international students.

“It also allows viewers to search videos for any word or phrase and replay the video from that point onwards. Students can print out screenshots with the corresponding transcript and notes, and interactive quizzes and video polls can also be added.â€?

Synote benefits from more than 20 years speech recognition and captioning research in collaboration with some of the world’s leading companies. It uses automatic speech recognition to generate the captions for lecture videos and enables students to easily collaborate to correct any errors.

Mike said: “Government legislation requires captions to be provided to make lecture videos accessible but the cost of using captioning companies can be prohibitive. Synote can reduce this cost making captioning all lectures possible.â€?

Fellow Synote Director Yunjia Li has been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship that identifies and supports the founders and leaders of tomorrow’s high-tech companies. Yunjia added: “We’ve already talked to more than 30 universities who agree that Synote could provide a great solution to the problems they share. We’ve started the company so that we can offer Synote to these customers and begin to make a real difference.â€?

Synote has received three major awards – the Times Higher Education ICT Initiative of the Year, the EUNIS Dorup E-Learning Award, and runner-up in the Individual Award category of the Association for Learning Technology Learning Technologist of the Year Award. Mike was also awarded a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy for enhancing learning and teaching through Synote.

To find out more about Synote visit www.synote.com