The University of Southampton’s Web Science Institute (WSI) was praised for its “energy and communityâ€? at the official launch of a new partnership that will help the adoption and implementation of Web standards in the UK.

The WSI is the new host of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) UK & Ireland Office, supporting an international community of member organisations that is leading the Web to its full potential. The Office was formally launched at the University on Friday 14 October at a packed event that included talks from W3C experts on current W3C activities. The day concluded with a Distinguished Lecture by political scientist Professor Jeanette Hofmann from the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB).

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the WSI, said: “The University of Southampton has played an active role in the Web community since 1994. The WSI feels like a natural fit to host the UK & Ireland Office.â€?

The W3C UK & Ireland Office will foster relationships with UK technology and policy leaders and help to promote the adoption and implementation of W3C standards in the UK. It will also recruit and engage with members in the region, and develop education and outreach programs to raise awareness of W3C’s role and standards activities by sponsoring and supporting local events where there is a focus on W3C topics.

Bernard Gidon, W3C’s Europe, Middle-East and Africa Business Development Leader, commented: “We have found a strong match with the WSI as we continue toward the W3C’s mission. It is fantastic to see the energy and community at the WSI, and I look forward to moving on together as we develop the web community in the UK.â€?

The University of Southampton has been a member of the W3C since 1998, promoting new futures of the Web through W3C community groups including the Web Observatory, Annotations and Web of Things.

The W3C UK & Ireland Office is staffed by Office Manager Susan Davies and Senior Advisor Professor Leslie Carr, of Electronics and Computer Science.

The growing cyber security threat posed by the increasing interconnectivity of smart devices is to be examined by a new Roke Manor Research (Roke)/ Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Chair based at the University of Southampton.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Director of the University’s Cyber Security Academy, will use the prestigious title to build upon effective collaboration with Roke as a key industrial partner around a research agenda that focuses on the evolving Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things is made of the growing network of devices that are connected through the internet, developing innovative applications which may expose society to new cyber threats. Professor Sassone, part of the department of Electronics and Computer Science, has set out to analyse this changing field in both cyber-physical systems and cyber-controlled infrastructures through the Research Chair.

“It is a great honour to be selected to advance this cutting-edge research with the support of Roke Manor Research,â€? he said. “It is my ambition to develop an enduring partnership between academia and industry. This award also represents a reward for the work I led towards the foundation of the Cyber Security Academy, a pioneering partnership between the University and key industry stakeholders, which we plan to develop as a technopole for cyber security in the south of England.â€?

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, said: “It is gratifying that Vladimiro has been recognised through this prestigious Research Chair and this reflects the world-leading research activities that exist within our department of Electronics and Computer Science. The research undertaken by Vladimiro is extremely important to create new knowledge that drives positive impact on both society and the economy.â€?

The world’s first conference for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) has been hailed a ‘phenomenal success’ by a Web and Internet Science (WAIS) researcher, who helped to organise the event.

Dr Simon Hettrick, from the WAIS research group in Electronics and Computer Science, was part of a Software Sustainability Institute team that hosted the event focusing exclusively on issues affecting people who write and use software in research.

Simon, a founding member and Deputy Director of the Institute, said: “RSEs are absolutely fundamental to research. They work with researchers to gain an understanding of the problems they face; and then develop, maintain and extend software to provide the answers.

“We wanted to give them the opportunity to share their methods and best practice on a much wider scale than they can at the moment.â€?

More than 200 RSEs from 14 different countries attended the innovative conference at the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester.

Simon added: “Seventy per cent of researchers report that their work has a fundamental reliance on software, so if we want the UK to continue to be a major research leader, then effort and resources must be invested into nurturing our community of RSEs.

“The RSE conference was a phenomenal success. It created a huge number of new collaborations and brought further attention to the fundamental importance of the RSE role in academia. I feel very positive about the future.â€?

Conference delegates learnt about the cutting-edge techniques being used in research and listened to a broad range of speakers including a keynote talk by Matthew Johnson, Leader of the Agile Projects Team, from Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, and Professor Susan Halford, a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.

The Software Sustainability Institute was set up six years ago by a team of experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, to support the UK’s research software community with cultivating better, more sustainable research software to enable world-class research. The Institute committed itself to promoting RSEs and the vital role they play in global research.

To find out more about the Software Sustainability Institute visit www.software.ac.uk

World-renowned computer scientist Professor Dame Wendy Hall, from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has received a prestigious award that honours women in maths and computing.

Professor Hall is one of 12 women to receive a Suffrage Science Award today (11 October) to celebrate their scientific achievements and ability to inspire others, at a special event at Bletchley Park.

The event coincides with Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the University’s Web Science Institute, said: “I’m deeply honoured to receive this award amongst other extraordinary women in maths and computing. However, I remain frustrated by the need for such schemes as Suffrage Science to exist. It will only change if it becomes everyone’s issue and not just a women’s issue. We need to get the language right, which is we’re top scientists, not top women scientists.â€?

The Suffrage Science scheme was formed five years ago by the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Imperial College London. The award is a new development of the scheme, which aims to encourage women into science and to reach senior leadership roles.

There are currently two sections of Suffrage Science, one for women in the Life Sciences, and one for those in Engineering and the Physical Sciences. Today's event launches a specialism for women in Maths and Computing.

The awards themselves are science-inspired pieces of jewellery, designed by students at the arts college Central Saint Martins-UAL. After two years, the winners hand on their jewellery to a recipient of their choice – this scientific ‘relay’ creates an ever-expanding cohort of talented women within the Maths and Computing field.

Read interviews with Dame Wendy and other awardees and see pictures of the jewellery competition and design in the Suffrage Science Maths and Computing brochure.

Women make up no more than four in ten undergraduates studying maths (London Mathematical Society), and fewer than two in ten of those studying computer science (WISE report, 2014).

New research, led by Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has demonstrated that a nanoscale device, called a memristor, could be used to power artificial systems that can mimic the human brain.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibit learning abilities and can perform tasks which are difficult for conventional computing systems, such as pattern recognition, on-line learning and classification. Practical ANN implementations are currently hampered by the lack of efficient hardware synapses; a key component that every ANN requires in large numbers.

In the study, published in Nature Communications, the Southampton research team experimentally demonstrated an ANN that used memristor synapses supporting sophisticated learning rules in order to carry out reversible learning of noisy input data.

Memristors are electrical components that limit or regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit and can remember the amount of charge that was flowing through it and retain the data, even when the power is turned off.

Lead author Dr Alex Serb, from the Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology research group in ECS, said: “If we want to build artificial systems that can mimic the brain in function and power we need to use hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions of artificial synapses, many of which must be able to implement learning rules of varying degrees of complexity. Whilst currently available electronic components can certainly be pieced together to create such synapses, the required power and area efficiency benchmarks will be extremely difficult to meet -if even possible at all- without designing new and bespoke 'synapse components'.

“Memristors offer a possible route towards that end by supporting many fundamental features of learning synapses (memory storage, on-line learning, computationally powerful learning rule implementation, two-terminal structure) in extremely compact volumes and at exceptionally low energy costs. If artificial brains are ever going to become reality, therefore, memristive synapses have to succeed.â€?

Acting like synapses in the brain, the metal-oxide memristor array was capable of learning and re-learning input patterns in an unsupervised manner within a probabilistic winner-take-all (WTA) network. This is extremely useful for enabling low-power embedded processors (needed for the Internet of Things) that can process in real-time big data without any prior knowledge of the data.

Co-author Dr Themis Prodromakis, Reader in Nanoelectronics and EPSRC Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, said: “The uptake of any new technology is typically hampered by the lack of practical demonstrators that showcase the technology’s benefits in practical applications. Our work establishes such a technological paradigm shift, proving that nanoscale memristors can indeed be used to formulate in-silico neural circuits for processing big-data in real-time; a key challenge of modern society.

“We have shown that such hardware platforms can independently adapt to its environment without any human intervention and are very resilient in processing even noisy data in real-time reliably. This new type of hardware could find a diverse range of applications in pervasive sensing technologies to fuel real-time monitoring in harsh or inaccessible environments; a highly desirable capability for enabling the Internet of Things vision.â€?

This interdisciplinary work was supported by a CHIST-ERA net award project and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It brought together engineers from the Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology Group at the University of Southampton with theoretical computer scientists at the Graz University of Technology, using the state-of-art facilities of the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre.

The Prodromakis Group at the University of Southampton is acknowledged as world-leading in this field, collaborating among others with Leon Chua (a Diamond Jubilee Visiting Academic at the University of Southampton), who theoretically predicted the existence of memristors in 1971.