Staff and students from Electronics and Computer Science often feature in the news for their research, achievements and expert opinion. Here are some you may have seen:
The Web's nasty tricks
Web Science expert Professor Les Carr gave expert comment to BBC News online about 'dark patterns' on the web. Discover more about Web Science here.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is pleased to announce that the Web Science Institute (WSI) at the University of Southampton has become the W3C UK & Ireland Office.
As the host of the W3C UK & Ireland Office, the WSI will help the W3C achieve its mission to broaden participation in W3C activities of more diverse stakeholders from the UK and Ireland. The WSI will foster relationships with UK technology and policy leaders and help to promote the adoption and implementation of W3C standards in the UK. The W3C UK & Ireland Office will also recruit and engage with members in the region, and develop education and outreach programs to raise awareness of W3Câs role and standards activities by sponsoring and supporting local events where there is a focus on W3C topics.
âThe WSI is excited to be taking on this important role within the W3C,â? said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Executive Director of the WSI. âThe University of Southampton has played an active role in the Web community since 1994 and 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.â?
J. Alan Bird, W3C Global Business Development Leader commented, âWith its wide range of research activities into the technologies and societal impact of the Web, the WSI is in a unique position to help broaden the scope and reach of the W3C. We look forward to working together to help the W3C achieve its mission.â?
The WSI carries out research into web science, data science, linked and open data, privacy, trust and provenance, social computation, cybersecurity, social media networks. These research activities align well with new W3C activities, including the W3C Data activities, Web Payments, Web Annotation, Web of Things, Security and Privacy and Web Accessibility.
The W3C UK & Ireland Office will be staffed by Susan Davies, Coordination Manager for the WSI, who will become the Office Manager, and Professor Leslie Carr, Director of the WSI Centre for Doctoral Training, who will act in a Senior Advisor role. The WSI takes over from Nominet, who has been running the Office since 2010.
About the W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth and stewardship for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium.
W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan and Beihang University in China. W3C has Offices in Australia; the Benelux countries; Brazil; Finland; France; Germany and Austria; Greece; Hungary; India; Italy; Korea; Morocco; Russia; Southern Africa; Spain; Sweden; and the United Kingdom and Ireland. For more information see https://www.w3.org/
About the WSI
The WSI brings together world-leading research expertise to tackle the most pressing global challenges facing the World Wide Web and wider society today. Its mission is to undertake interdisciplinary research that creates new knowledge about the impact and direction of the Web; to educate students to be architects of change in a digital culture; and to provide a vital source of contemporary strategic and tactical intelligence to its partners. Professor Dame Wendy Hall is the Executive Director of the WSI. She is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking contributions in the field of Web and Internet Sciences and is a member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance. Read more about the Web Science Institute http://www.southampton.ac.uk/wsi
Isha Gupta receiving award from Prof Mohamad Sawan, IEEE ISCAS 2016 chair
Isha Gupta from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has been named the winner of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) best paper award. Ishaâs paper was entitled âPractical Operation Considerations for Memristive Integrating Sensorsâ.
This project aims to create a biohybrid architecture merging natural and artificial neurons endowed with elements of plasticity into a unique entity. Artificial neurons, realized in a silicon microchip by a combination of CMOS and memristor technology, are physically interfaced to natural neurons through electrical transducers forming a biohybrid network. This new system is capable of self-organization, evolving and adapting to input stimuli owing to intrinsic plasticity of the natural component and to the interplay with the artificial network.
Dr Themis Prodromakis commented, âIt is fantastic to see that our hard-work is recognised in a major international conference and motivates us for keeping up with battling the challenges in this interdisciplinary field of research.â?
The IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) is the world's premier networking forum of leading researchers in the highly active fields of theory, design and implementation of circuits and systems. At the symposium, Dr Prodromakisâ team also showcased their first commercial product, ArC One™, a versatile high performance testing platform for characterising âen masseâ novel technologies in a fast and automated fashion. In addition, Dr Alex Serb, Research Fellow in the Prodromakis group, was elected to serve as member on the Neural Systems & Applications and Sensory Systems Technical Committees of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
Low-cost underwater unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) are to scan the ocean and gather environmental information for management of one of Europeâs busiest ports using ground-breaking technology from European researchers.
The on-demand UAVs will drive intelligent data analytics to provide the Port of Leixões, Portugal with environmental impacts in a matter of hours.
The Internet-connected UAVs will send observations to a geo-spatial environmental data fusion platform that prepares data for marine risk analysis allowing for rapid response impact analysis. The trial is conducted as part of research by the European Commission funded SUNRISE EXPOSURES project.
The projectâs technical lead Michael Boniface, Technical Director at the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, UK, said: âMarine industry stakeholders will collaborate to create a new data value chain that builds on low-cost drones and advanced data analytics to seamlessly connect surveyors, marine analysts and authorities. These drones are small enough to be launched by one person and cost less than 100,000 Euros allowing them to be preconfigured for marine applications, such as scour and sediment transport analysis.
âBy combining the drones with Internet connectivity, geospatial data fusion, and linked data access, marine analysts will have the information they need for assessing threats such as marine accidents, extreme weather events and periodic degradation.â?
Jonathan Williams, CEO of Marine Southeast, UK, said: âThis revolutionary technology will create opportunity to address many challenges faced by industry operating in the blue economy. From port operations to marine aquaculture and offshore windfarms, the SUNRISE EXPOSURES provides industry with ways to transform risks management for maintenance, crisis and regulatory compliance.â?
To ensure the technology is developed to full effect, the consortium runs an EXPOSURES âInterest Groupâ where potential end-users and other interested parties from the marine industry, government agencies and scientific community are able to learn more about the project. To join the group, please visit www.groupspaces.com/EXPOSURES and click on the green âJoinâ button.
The consortium, which is made up of the University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, UK; Marine Southeast Ltd, UK; and SUNRISE project partners especially the Laboratório de Sistemas e Tecnologia Subaquática (http://www.lsts.pt/) from University of Porto, Portugal, have collaborated to deliver a geospatial data management platform exploiting underwater Internet of Things for the evaluation of marine environmental processes and risks.
Team members Dr Enrico Gerding, Dr Sebastian Stein, Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Avi Rosenfeld being presented with their award
A Southampton team from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has won the 'Best Innovative Applications Paper' award at this yearâs annual AAMAS conference â the international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
The team of researchers from the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group in ECS, have been working on electric vehicle (EV) smart charging mechanisms. These mechanisms will become necessary as an increase in EVs will place significant strains on our electricity distribution infrastructure. Their work mostly focuses on how auction-like market mechanisms can be applied to schedule EV charging intelligently and efficiently. In these mechanisms, drivers effectively place bids on electricity, which indicate their willingness to pay and their individual constraints for charging.
The teamâs paper, âBid2Charge: Market user interface design for electric vehicle chargingâ?, won the Best Innovative Applications Paper award at the AAMAS Conference, held this year in Singapore. In it, the team explored how these complex auction mechanisms can be presented through simple interfaces to non-expert users (ie EV drivers). This is a vital step towards making such mechanisms usable and acceptable for their intended end-users. Through experiments with over 300 non-expert users, they showed that simpler interfaces (which significantly reduce the complexity of the bids that drivers can submit) reduce not only deliberation time for drivers, but actually increase their performance at the same time. This means they choose bids that more closely match their driving patterns, without requesting too much or too little electricity for charging.
The paper also shows how reinforcement learning (a type of machine learning) can be used to predict how people respond to these simplified interfaces. This promises to enable the designers of charging mechanisms (eg EV / chargepoint manufacturers or electricity distribution companies) to test wide ranges of interfaces before starting costly user trials.
AAMAS is the main international conference on intelligent agents, and it is also one of the most prestigious AI conferences. The âInnovative Applicationsâ? theme is a special track at the conference for applications of agent-based technologies to commercial and/or public policy domains.