Surfing the Web could become a much more effective experience thanks to new approaches endorsed at this year’s ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Hypertext Conference. In its current state, the commonly used link in a Web page allows people to search the Web and to use hyperlinks to jump from one page to another. The down side is that when people click links, pages load on top of one another and unless they can recall the route taken, it is easy to lose much of the content of the search along the way. For their comparison of new models, called Hyperstructures, for representing information on the Web, dr monica schraefel from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and Michael Mc Guffin from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto received an ACM SigWeb Special Research Distinction, Awarded for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts. Their paper describes hyperstructures including zzstructures (developed by ECS Visiting Professor Ted Nelson) and mSpaces (developed by schraefel), in terms of graph theory. Hyperstructures allow hypertext information like the Web to be presented in ways that show not just the links between pages, but the multiple relationships between the information in the pages. For instance, one view of a group of musicians might show how they are all from a particular country; another might show how they all create a particular style of music, or all had their first performance before they were six. The formalizing of hyperstructures into well-known graph-theoretic terms allowed the authors to make specific comparisons between zzstructures and mSpaces in particular. No such comparison, either formally or conceptually, between these hyperstructure approaches had been previously described. The aim of creating both the formal descriptions and the resulting comparisons was to provide a clear means for designers to compare the attributes of these hyperstructures so that they could decide which approaches best suited their information design requirements. dr schraefel comments: ‘By considering new models for representing information which go beyond generic organizing structures like the lists we see from a Google search, we can consider equally new approaches for representing hypermedia information spaces that let us explore the relationships among the information, rather than just the data in a page. Relationships within information let us develop different kinds of knowledge about something. We hope that our comparisons of how we can represent these relationships will act as the basis for designers to be able to make informed design decisions about the attributes they might want to use from these structures if they want to design richer information spaces than what the Web currently allows.’

A new middleware package which will take grid computing out of research laboratories and into industry will be pre-released on Monday 25 October. The middleware is the first to be released by the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII), whose mission is to become the UK source for reliable, open-source Grid Middleware. The OMII was launched earlier this year and is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. OMII is a £6.5m project funded by the UK e-science programme and led by Professor Peter Henderson and Professor David De Roure. Grid Middleware is already being manufactured and promoted by several organisations, but according to Dr Alistair Dunlop, Director of OMII, greater emphasis needs to be placed on useability of these systems with a low entry cost to organisations. ‘Customers have made significant investments in tooling and standards and they want to use these existing tools to develop standard-compliant web services,’ he said. OMII has taken the middleware that exists on the market and refined the codes so that it is packaged in a way that meets users’ needs. The OMII Grid infrastructure does this by providing a number of common services, such as security and accounting, which are available to all deployed applications and which as a result benefit from a consistent security policy. Dr Dunlop said: ‘This is good news for collaborative science. OMII has invested a significant amount of time and effort on improving the ease with which the grids can be established and managed. This is an area which has befallen grids of the past. OMII’s emphasis is a major shift in taking Grid computing out of research labs and into industry.’ A public pre-release of the new software will take place on 25 October, followed by full release on 6 December 2004.

A new anti-spam device, which could put an end to email scam 'phishing' frauds, was launched on 1 November. The term 'phishing' describes the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. This year, UK bank customers have been targeted by a new wave of 'phishing' frauds. The fraudsters send emails claiming to be from banks and credit card companies, which invite customers to access what appears to be a genuine and legitimate financial services home page and update their details. Customers are asked to log on by keying in their details, including access codes and passwords; in many cases this has led to their accounts being emptied. Now, to combat this fraud, Julian Field, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has developed a new and effective device. Julian is lead developer of MailScanner, which is already the world's most widely used anti-spam computer security system. Julian's new device searches for web links in email messages and compares the address provided with the actual organisation's address. If the two do not match, MailScanner places a large red message in the email by the link, alerting users to the warning and flagging the real location of the website as well as the bogus version. Julian comments: 'These attacks are proving highly effective at stealing people's credit card numbers, PIN numbers and just about any other confidential personal information the thieves want. The copy of the bank's website is an extremely good imitation and quite good enough to fool 99.9 per cent of people into thinking that it is the real thing. Our device, the first of its kind, will alert people and hopefully stamp out this crime. It needs no frequent updates and will identify these attacks before they hit anyone's mailbox.'

Professor David Payne FRS, CBE, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, will be awarded the Kelvin Medal, one of science's most prestigious honours, at a ceremony at the Institution of Civil Engineers, on Tuesday 2 November.

The award follows the presentation to Professor Payne last week of the CBE from HM The Queen at Buckingham Palace, for services to photonics.

Previous winners of the Kelvin Medal include radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi and Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine.

A leading international expert in photonics and optical fibre technology, Professor Payne has spearheaded many key advances in optical-fibre communications, including the development of the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, which has revolutionised telecommunications over the past thirty years.

Professor Payne is Chairman and Director of Southampton Photonics Inc, an international spin-out company from the University of Southampton which manufactures several of his inventions. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society of America and the Royal Society of Arts. This year he celebrates his fortieth year at the University of Southampton, which he joined as an undergraduate in 1964.

He commented: 'This honours not just me, but all the hundreds of world-class photonics scientists with whom I have had the privilege to work over the years and who have made the ORC the internationally recognized centre it is today. I am looking forward to many more years of innovation in this exciting field.'

Professor John Burland, Chairman of the Institution of Civil Engineers awards committee added: 'Professor Payne's research into photonics, and its application to produce many of the key advances in optic fibre communications over the past 30 years, has made an outstanding contribution to the application of science to engineering. This exceptional work makes him a very worthy winner of the Kelvin Medal for 2004.'

The brilliant dazzle of butterflies’ wings could hold the key to a new type of optical material, called photonic crystals. Over the past 15 years, photonic crystals have attracted the attention of a vast international community, as scientists have begun to realise their potential applications in the field of optoelectronics and telecommunications. According to Dr Luca Plattner, who undertook research in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, our understanding of the way that light is reflected from the wings of butterflies could lead to the fabrication of new photonic crystals. Dr Plattner investigated the optical properties of a periodic nanostructure found on the wings of a tropical butterfly, Morpho rhetenor. Several decades of scientific investigation had shown that understanding the source of the butterfly’s dazzling blue coloration required the use of the most advanced techniques employed in optical engineering. Dr Plattner’s study explored the remarkable properties of the nanostructures and the physical mechanisms that produce them, both experimentally through optical measurements which complemented those reported by other scientists, and theoretically via cutting-edge simulation techniques developed for photonics. This enabled him to fabricate optical structures inspired by the butterfly microstructure using silicon-based materials and processes that are common in microelectronics. The work was carried out under the supervision of Professor Greg Parker. ‘The reason for studying the structure on the wings of that particular butterfly was that it has strong similarities to the photonic crystals already fabricated in the ECS Microelectronics Research Group,’ said Luca Plattner. ‘I was able to explore a biomimetic process, one in which we can learn new lessons from nature which are beneficial to both engineers and entomologists.’ Dr Plattner’s work will be published in the first print issue of the Royal Society’s Interface magazine, due out on 22 November.

Representatives of the University and IBM met in Zepler Foyer last week to celebrate the long-standing collaboration between the two organizations. The partnership dates back over 25 years, and encompasses both research and student support, and the supply of computing resources. Electronics and Computer Science has provided the main focus for joint activity between the University and IBM, but many other Schools and departments have also been involved, including Mathematics, Chemistry, E-Science, Management, GeoData, and ISS. Most recently the collaboration between ECS and the IBM UK Laboratories at Hursley Park has been an important factor in the founding of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute in ECS. Also being celebrated today is the University's new £1.2 million IRIDIS IBM computer, which will support some of the University's largest e-science projects. Today's event will be followed by the 5th IBM Hursley Lecture, being given this year by Dr Caroline Kovac, General Manager of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, in the Turner Sims Concert Hall, at 6 pm: 'Information-based Medicine: A New Era in Patient Care.'

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been named as one of 40 ‘technology masterminds’ by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers of the USA (IEEE). In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the IEEE’s influential Spectrum journal, 40 leading thinkers from the worlds of science and engineering were asked to cast their gaze over the technology landscape and consider what are the biggest advances of the last 40 years, and what will have the biggest impact over the coming decade. In her contribution, Professor Hall named the Web as the most important technology: ‘When I saw Tim Berners-Lee demonstrate it in 1991 I saw an interesting system, but not what it was going to do—and honestly I’m not sure he knew either,’ she said. Looking to the future, she added: ‘I’m fascinated by how computer scientists can learn from neuroscientists and vice versa. We’re talking about building increasingly complex adaptive systems that need to evolve and we have models of this throughout nature.’ Professor Hall has just completed a one-year term of office as President of the British Computer Society. She is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology.

To meet the UK's massive demand for mobile communications it is essential for designers and programmers to work more closely together.

This is the premise of the UK's first Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Tools Forum, which is being held at the Institution of Electrical Engineers on Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 November, to review the tools used to design today's complex semiconductors and electronic systems.

The EDA Tools Forum, which is being co-organised and chaired by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, brings together speakers from industry developers and design companies such as Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Cadence, Magma Design and ARM.

'We need mobile phones, PDAs and digital cameras and we want low power equipment at lower prices,' comments Professor Al-Hashimi. 'The challenge is to develop new EDA tools which will allow designers to produce error-free complex products much more quickly.'

As well as addressing the most pressing issues in the design, application and development of Electronic Design Automation tools, the conference will provide an opportunity for product designers and EDA tool-makers to look at how they can work more closely together and to review current barriers to progress. It will also enable newly-qualified engineers to familiarise themselves with the challenges ahead.

'Technology is changing all the time and EDA tools need to be updated,' comments Professor Al-Hashimi. 'This forum is about bringing together the developers of these tools and the designers to iron out the problems.'

UK scientists have designed a knowledge management system which could enable medical practitioners to make speedy, informed decisions about breast cancer patients. The project pulls together information which was previously held in separate locations and it has the potential to revolutionise patient diagnosis and management. The MIAKT project (Medical Imaging with Advanced Knowledge Technologies), aims to facilitate medical practitioners in diagnosing and treating breast cancer. The project is funded jointly by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Its first phase ends in January 2005 and the MIAKT team is now seeking further development funding. The system uses Semantic web technologies, enabling information from X-ray mammograms, MRI images, biopsy results and data from the clinician to be made available when the practitioners meet for their weekly Triple Assessment Procedure. Semantic web technologies allow information to be linked in such a way that it can be easily processed by machines. Practitioners can then view different types of images and scans, call up patient information, and automatically generate reports. It is also possible to investigate, annotate and analyse the data using web and Grid services. ‘This research draws on technologies in which the UK is a world leader,’ says Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. ‘Eventually, e-health will be delivered using the web and incredibly powerful networks of computers. Medical practitioners will have the information and evidence at their fingertips to support decision-making that has a direct impact on us all.’ The ECS team, which is working with the University of Sheffield, the University of Oxford, King’s College London and the Open University on MIAKT, believes that there is potential to develop the project further. They are currently investigating the possibility of developing software to extend the capabilities of the system; additional funding will be needed to enable them to do this.