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

The International Consortium of Nanotechnologies (ICoN), led by the University of Southampton, was pleased to host a visit by Datuk Ir (Dr) Abdul Rahim Hj Hashim, FASc, the current Vice Chancellor of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) earlier this month.

Dr Rahim was appointed as the Vice Chancellor of the Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) on November 1, 2012. He graduated in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom and worked for PETRONAS for 32 years, including as Vice President Research and Technology. In October 2016 he was admitted as a William Pitt Fellow by the Pembroke College of Cambridge.

A professional engineer, he sat on the Board of Engineers Malaysia and was Chairman of the Engineering Accreditation Council of Malaysia. He is currently an Advisor of Institute of Materials Malaysia, a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and a member of the Board of Engineers National Monitoring Committee.

Following a welcome by Sir Christopher Snowden, Southampton’s Vice Chancellor, Dr Themis Prodromakis, ICON’s Project Director and member of the Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology research group in Electronics and Computer Science, accompanied Dr Rahim and his wife on a tour of the campus including Southampton’s state of the art cleanroom facilities.

Dr Rahim appreciated the “work that Southampton University is currently undertaking and the impressive facilities that you have on campus especially the Zepler Institute.â€? He went on to say that UTP would be “very keen to work with Southampton University on areas that complement both our strengths and at the time help build our expertise further. Our participation in the ICON initiative is one example.â€?

A small workshop is planned to develop some of the ideas discussed during the visit, with the aim of producing a programme and ongoing collaboration.