This week's graduation ceremony at the University of Southampton sees a double celebration for Professor of Telecommunications, Lajos Hanzo. Not only will Professor Hanzo be awarded a higher doctorate (DSc) by the University for his distinguished lifetime research in adaptive wireless communications systems, but at the same ceremony his son, also named Lajos Hanzo, will receive a First Class Master of Computer Engineering degree.

Over the last 10 years Professor Hanzo has established a reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on adaptive wireless communications systems. He has co-authored ten Anglo-American John Wiley/IEEE Press books on mobile radio communications and multimedia signal processing, and with the rise of mobile multimedia communications his work has become of crucial importance.

'If the wireless Internet is to become a reality, then there are a number of further research challenges which have to be overcome,' says Professor Hanzo. 'The ether is a hostile wave-propagation medium, especially when transmitting the high amount of multimedia information that is needed to create the impression of virtual presence. We are already accustomed to sophisticated services over wires or optical cables, but to create 'tele-presence', transmitting over radio waves, will require a further quantum leap from the current state of the art represented by the mobile telephone.'

To add to the celebrations, Professor Hanzo was last week elected as a Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, a highly prestigious honour, which follows his election last year as Fellow of the IEEE in the United States.

Professor Hanzo held academic posts in Hungary and Germany, before joining the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in 1986. He was awarded the Chair of Telecommunications in 1998, and leads the Communications research group in ECS, which has many industrial partners.

His son, Lajos, will next year be embarking on postgraduate research, aiming for a PhD degree in mobile multimedia networking at the University of Surrey.

Over 300 ECS students, accompanied by families and friends, attended this year's Graduation ceremonies at the University of Southampton.

Addressing the guests at the reception and prize-giving ceremonies which followed Graduation, Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School, congratulated the new graduates on their achievements, and urged them to stay in touch with the School in the future.

An innovation at this year's event was the plasma screen in the Zepler Foyer, which carried scrolling lists of all the graduates and prize-winners, as well as photos from the ceremonies which had only just taken place.

From next year the School will be implementing a new alumni programme to maintain strong links with all its graduates worldwide.

Researchers at the universities of Southampton and Vienna have demonstrated that the complex and individual performance styles of concert pianists such as Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz can be modelled in unique "performance alphabets", providing a method of recognizing their performance styles by computer, and also, possibly, reconstructing them.

Concert pianist Glenn Gould had a unique and instantly recognizable performance style, for which he is rightly renowned. Indeed, the extent to which pianists such as Gould, Horowitz and Uchida have a discernibly individual style of playing is recognized not just by classical music aficionados, who can hear the differences, but also by computers, which can analyse the differences and model them.

Now a group of researchers at the Universities of Vienna and Southampton have made significant advances in demonstrating repeated and identifiable differences in individual performances of the same work, to such an extent that a "performance alphabet" could be drawn up for each composer.

Not only does this provide a means of identifying individual pianists using only minimal information from audio recordings, it also means that one can countenance the possibility of modelling aspects of a performance of a piece as it would have been played, for example, by Horowitz.

The researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, led by Professor Gerhard Widmer took two measures of the way the same Mozart sonatas were played by Glenn Gould, Daniel Barenboim, Andras Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Roland Batik, and Maria Joao Pires. These measures were tempo, as measured against a fixed tempo, and volume, or loudness. Professor John Shawe-Taylor of the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science has led a group developing new methods of analysing the results obtained by the Vienna team.

"Different players have different ways of building tension or expression in the music," says John Shawe-Taylor describing the work of the Vienna team, "and they represent this raw data for every note and progression of the music as a trajectory, which can be represented visually in tempo-loudness space as a "performance worm"." The Vienna researchers have constructed a visual representation of these changes, which can also be compared.

The researchers then obtained certain characteristics of the performance by analysing the movement of the worm. "A performer may consistently produce loudness/tempo changes unique to themselves at specific points in a piece," says John Shawe-Taylor, "for example in association with particular cadences."

The researchers at Vienna have for example observed that Mitsuko Uchida demonstrates a particular way of combining a crescendo-decrescendo with a slowing down during a loudness maximum. These patterns were often repeated in Mozart performances by Mitsuko Uchida, but were rarely found when analysing the recordings of other performers.

The novel analysis techniques applied to the performance worm data at the University of Southampton were able to distinguish the different performers based on a relatively small sample of their performances.

On a more speculative note, John Shawe-Taylor says: "Basically we are seeking common patterns across two different ways of looking at an event. On the one hand we have the musical score, and on the other, its interpretation by an individual concert pianist.

"If we could combine our description of the way the piece is performed and the musical score, and discern the connection between the two, then we might be able to generate aspects of a Horowitz performance of a piece that he had never actually played."

Minute amounts of organic pollutants�including oestrone�can now be detected in river water as a result of a new optical sensing instrument realised in a project funded by the EU's Environment Programme.

Pollution in water sources has been identified as a major source of environmental hazard, most recently associated with gender changes in fish, and implicated in falling levels of male fertility. Monitoring water quality and identifying pollution sources is therefore crucially important in river management.

Across the EU, methods of water monitoring need to be developed and implemented to ensure effective standardized enforcement of EU water quality directives. With partners in the UK, Germany, Spain, and the Slovak Republic, the EU-funded AWACSS (Automated Water Analyser Computer Supported System) project has developed a cost-effective online water-monitoring instrument that will help meet the needs of water managers.

The new instrument has drawn on the skills of research scientists and environmentalists and has been successfully demonstrated in river waters. It is designed for networking across Europe, and further developments are expected to enable early detection and warning.

The system uses optical sensors to enable rapid, simultaneous and high-sensitivity fluorescence detection of up to 32 organic pollutants and pesticides in river water. Amongst the pollutants to be successfully detected is oestrone, which occurs naturally and as a by-product of the contraceptive pill.

"Optical sensors have great potential in simultaneous, rapid, high-sensitivity measurement of multiple pollutants in water," said Professor James Wilkinson of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton.

"The biosensor chip enables us to measure a large number of low molecular weight organic pollutants, and we have successfully detected levels at below 1 nanogram per litre for oestrone, which is one hundred times better than the original project target.

"Ultimately the instrument will be networked so that pollution sources can be monitored remotely with full automation," he continued, "and trend analysis and early-warning capabilities will be provided."

It is envisaged that the network will be distributed over a water catchment area, allowing a source of pollution to be localized early and characterized rapidly. In cases of severe water pollution, precautionary systems will be activated automatically or manually by operators of wastewater treatment plants.

Last year's widely disruptive power cuts in the UK, Europe and the United States demonstrated the extent to which we rely on electricity, and the catastrophic consequences to all aspects of our lives when the supply fails. A unique facility being opened this week at the University of Southampton is intended to help avoid these damaging incidents by providing the specialized research and testing facilities on which the power supply industry depends. This Friday (10th September) sees the opening of a major extension to the University's High Voltage Laboratory, more than doubling its size through the creation of a new high voltage hall, in addition to new laboratories providing important new research and testing facilities. Guests at the ceremony will represent the electricity industry and academic research groups throughout the UK. The Laboratory will be officially opened by the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bill Wakeham, accompanied by Mrs Susan Davies, who will name the Lab after her husband, the late Professor Tony Davies. It was Professor Davies's vision that led to the building of the Laboratory extension, but sadly he died shortly after completing the plans. The High Voltage Laboratory is therefore a fitting memorial to his life and work. Combining academic research and commercial testing, the new Laboratory will play a major part in enabling the electricity power supply industry to undertake the research and consultancy on which it depends for successful electricity transmission in the future. With the decline of commercial research and testing facilities as a result of reorganization in the power supply industry, the UK desperately needs specialized research laboratories of this kind. "Power engineering is a central feature of our work," says Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The Laboratory has been extended and updated as a result of Government investment, a significant recognition of the value of our research capability. We are also one of only three UK universities selected to be founding partners in the Power Academy initiative, which will train new graduates for the industry. We now have one of the largest and best-equipped high voltage labs in Europe and fully intend to share our expertise with the electricity industry.

A new anti-spam feature devised by MailScanner mastermind, Julian Field, could lessen the amount of junk mail that companies and individuals receive.

The new development works by using a spam filtering system which scores messages, deleting those which are the most ‘spammy’ and wrapping the remaining ones in other messages so that if they happen to be offensive, the recipient is shielded from the full impact. Spam and viruses are now persistent and recurring threats to the security of the Internet, threatening the operations of business and public networks, companies, and government departments, as well as personal email accounts worldwide. Julian, who is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, began developing MailScanner in 2000, and it has now become the world’s most widely-used email security and anti-spam system, protecting around 40,000 sites around the world, and blocking 500 million spam messages daily. This month, he launches a Guide to MailScanner which brings together all the information about the software for its thousands of users around the world. According to Julian, the success of his operation lies in its open source system.He comments: ‘To securely perform its role, MailScanner must be reliable and trustworthy. The only way to achieve the required level of trust is to be open source, an approach that commercial suppliers are not willing to take. By virtue of being open source, the technology has been reviewed many times over by some of the world’s best and brightest in the field of computer security.’ Julian claims that the system’s spam handling technology is ahead of the competition. He comments: ‘Our spam handling features are much more flexible than other systems. Even if our system thinks a message is spam, it can still let it through but can wrap it up in another message so that if it is offensive, it won’t hit you in the face.’ The success of MailScanner can be judged from the fact that it is used in some of the world’s leading organizations, including Vodafone Europe, US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities, and Amnesty International, Friends Of The Earth and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering. Julian continues to develop MailScanner’s capabilities and upgrade the system: ‘By being open source, I can react very quickly to add extra layers of defence when the virus writers try to exploit a newly discovered vulnerability in users' email applications,’ he says. ‘MailScanner does not solely rely on the virus scanners to protect messages--there are multiple levels of defence so that users are protected from new virus outbreaks before the commercial (closed-source) AV vendors publish detection signatures for them.’ The MailScanner book was written and published to provide a single central easy-to-use resource that brings together information about using MailScanner from many different locations on the net to help all the administrators who use it. It also provides a very in-depth analysis of the design of MailScanner to assist more advanced users managing complex configurations for large sites. An article in last month’s PC PRO magazine fully underlined Julian’s role in the global fight against viruses: ‘How many of you have “Julian Field gets run over by a busâ€? as a bullet point in your disaster recovery plan?’it warned.

Perpetuum, a new spin-out company from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has raised capital from the venture capitalists, IP2IPO Group plc. Perpetuum is developing integrated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) that harvest vibrational energy from the environment, which can then release the energy to run systems. The company aims to address the desire for small, lower power and wireless electronic devices, many of which currently depend on batteries. Perpetuum's self-powered microsystems are capable of generating power indefinitely, without maintenance or pollution. The company is able to produce fully integrated self-powered silicon integrated circuits that can interact with their environment and transmit data via a wireless link. Perpetuum's founders are Professor Neil White, Steve Beeby, John Tudor, and Nick Harris, who have worked together for over 15 years in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'Perpetuum represents the culmination of many years of research and development,' said Professor White. 'The formation of the company will enable us to respond to strong customer demand from many different sectors. I am delighted that IP2IPO has been involved with the company, and I look forward to working with the team to accelerate Perpetuum's development.' IP2IPO has acquired a 28.2 per cent stake in Perpetuum.

The use of agent-based computing systems can result in significant business savings, according to speakers at this year’s Agent Technology Conference (ATC).

The conference, which takes place in Zurich on Friday 1 October, will bring together world-leading agent technology experts and representatives from traditional industries to report on how they are using autonomous computer agents to perform functions in the workplace.

This year’s ATC will feature invited presentations from IT organizations and research centres, including Whitestein Technologies AG, CapGemini, Magenta Technology, Microsoft and Fujitsu. The conference is co-ordinated by the Universities of Southampton and Liverpool.

Speakers will raise awareness of how agent-based technologies can contribute to better businesses, allowing users to make real savings, particularly in the creation of virtual organizations, and in the manufacturing field where automated robots are becoming more commonplace.

The conference will also address some of the challenges which lie ahead. According to Professor Michael Luck from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and a member of the ATC Executive Committee, one of the main issues to be addressed is that of the changing nature of agent-based systems.

‘We are beginning to witness a change from closed systems to more open systems,’ he says, ‘such as agents bidding in auctions in the marketplace. As systems become more open, they will need to be developed further to allow smooth interaction and communication between agents.’

Professor Luck also believes that collaboration between agents, particularly in open systems, will only succeed if there is trust. In order for this to happen, a user must have confidence that an agent which represents them in an open system will work effectively on their behalf and be secure and tamper-proof. Further work is needed to ensure that this is the case.

A solution which allows computer agents to collude, rather than compete with each other, has won this year’s recreation of Axelrod’s classic Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma competition. The winning solution was devised by a team from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) which met the competition’s 20th anniversary challenge to resolve the original dilemma in a noisy environment where moves could be misinterpreted. Professor Nick Jennings, a member of the ECS winning team said: ‘We developed ways of looking at the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a more realistic environment and devised a way for agents to recognise and collude with one another despite the noise. Our solution beats the standard tit-for-tat strategy.’ The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma has been of interest to the world of computer science since the publication of Robert Axelrod’s seminal book in the 1980s. It presents a simple game between two prisoners, in which their combined choices to co-operate or defect, determines whether they are imprisoned or walk free. Both players make a choice and then their decisions are revealed and both receive scores. Up to this year, the most common strategy applied to the dilemma was tit-for-tat which consistently outperformed every strategy entered in the original competition. It starts out by co-operating, and then punishes any strategy that defects by defecting on the next move. The solution devised by ECS uses coding theory to enable agents to recognise one another and to transmit messages reliably over noisy communication channels. No outside communication is allowed so the agents have to recognise one another by playing a specific sequence of moves at the start of each game. Dr Alex Rogers, another ECS team member said: “A key question in future computing systems is how the different agents within the system should interact and co-operate. Working on simple models such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma gives a fundamental understanding of how to tackle these problems.â€?

Techniques for the separation and detection of nano-particles, which have the potential to identify genetic mismatches in DNA, will be honoured by the 9th Desty Award for Innovation in Separation Science this Wednesday (20 October) at the Royal Institution.The award, which will be presented to this year’s winner Professor Hywel Morgan from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, recognises real innovation in the area of separation science and chromatography, a science which uses a broad range of physical methods to separate and analyse complex mixtures. After receiving his award, Professor Morgan will present a lecture on his latest research in separation science. He will describe how he uses alternating current electric fields to manipulate and separate biological particles, how these fields are generated inside micro-chips made using micro and nano-lithographic techniques, and how this technology can be used to identify and separate cells, bacteria, viruses, DNA and even molecules. Professor Morgan said: ‘It is a great honour to receive the 9th Desty Award and to have an opportunity to describe my research in this field. We have made huge advances in the use of electric fields for the separation and detection of particles within bio chips and our work has many applications in separation science and in other fields. We hope one day to be able to use this technology to identify and sort beads covered with specific fragments of DNA, so that we can identify genetic mistakes and screen for potential diseases.’ The award presentation and lecture at the Royal Institution in London will form part of a one-day meeting (10.30am-4.30pm) of the world leaders in chromatography.