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.

The Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, incorporating Electronics & Computer Science, Physics & Astronomy and the Optoelectronics Research Centre is celebrating well-earned recognition in the Times Higher Education (THE) Subject Rankings 2016-2017, for the quality of its programmes.

Computer Science, a new subject ranking for the THE this year, is ranked 54th amongst the world’s best. The ranking places the University 7th amongst listed UK universities for the subject and 19th in Europe.

Paul Lewin, Head of ECS said, “It is wonderful to see that the hard work of our computer science staff and students is recognised in the Times World Rankings. Our research in computer science is world leading. This is reflected in the quality of our education programmes and the range of module subjects that ensure our graduates are highly employable.â€?

The Faculty also performed successfully in other subject rankings with Physical Sciences achieving 77th place globally, 10th place in the UK and 29th in Europe. Engineering and Technology was placed 92nd globally, 9th in the UK and 25th in Europe.

The subject rankings come just one week after the publication of the THE’s World Rankings which saw Southampton placed 121st in the world and 16th out of 91 UK institutions listed. Rankings are based on criteria encompassing Teaching, International Outlook, Research, Citations and Industry Income.