Professor Jeremy Baumberg is this year's winner of the Royal Society's prestigious Mullard Award.

The award has been made to Professor Baumberg for his work in nanoscience and nanotechnology and for his contribution to the national prosperity of the UK through the University's spin-out company Mesophotonics Ltd in developing optical chips. He will receive his award from Paul Boateng MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury on Monday 29 November at a Royal Society dinner.

The Mullard Award is given annually by the Council of the Royal Society to an individual who has an outstanding academic record in any area of natural science, engineering or technology, and whose work is currently making, or has the potential to make, a contribution to UK national prosperity. The Award is aimed at younger scientists, engineers and technologists and consists of a silver gilt medal, a prize of £2000 and a travel/conference grant of up to £1500.

Previous recipients of the Mullard Award include Lionel Pilkington who was honoured for his outstanding advances in the technology of glass manufacture.

Professor Baumberg says: 'It is a huge honour to receive the Mullard Award. The Award is a testament to the strength of purpose and dedication of a number of strong teams whom I am privileged to work with on nano-construction.'

Before taking up the post of Professor of Meso-/Nano-scale Science and Technology at Southampton in October 1998, Professor Baumberg explored novel ultrafast optoelectronics at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory within the University of Cambridge for four years. He has also held an IBM research fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a research fellowship at Oxford. His current post is based in the School of Physics and Astronomy but he also works widely across the University with researchers in Electronics and Computer Science and other departments.

He has a wide range of research interests spanning nanophotonics, quantum dots, ultrafast coherent control, self-assembling nanostructures, semiconductor microcavities and photonic crystals. His wide-ranging success was recognised by the 2000 Institute of Physics Charles Vernon Boys Medal, and the prestigious 2004 Mott Lectureship.

Progress in photonic nanostructures recently led to his involvement in the successful spin-out from the University of Southampton of a new company, Mesophotonics Limited. He also chairs the Southampton NanoMaterials Forum and is director of the Southampton NanoMaterials Rapid Prototyping Facility, which was opened last February by Minister for Science and Innovation Lord Sainsbury.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is to take up a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. He will hold this position alongside his current appointments as Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). 'We are delighted that Tim Berners-Lee has accepted this appointment,' said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'Many of the staff in the School have worked with him on the development of the World Wide Web over many years, and we are now closely involved with the evolution of the Semantic Web, which is Tim's vision for the future of the Web.’ 'Tim’s appointment is a fantastic boost to our work here in Southampton', said Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, the UK’s largest Semantic Web project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. 'It also enables us to deepen our involvement with both US and European initiatives in this area.' The Semantic Web has been described by Tim Berners-Lee as 'an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation'. The Semantic Web provides a common framework which allows data to be shared and reused across applications, enterprises, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. Since 1994 he has been based at MIT, directing the W3 Consortium, the standard-setting body which develops common protocols to realize the full potential of the Web. In 1999 he was named by Time Magazine as one of the top 20 scientists and thinkers of the twentieth century: 'From the thousands of interconnected threads of the Internet, he wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the twenty-first century.' In 1996 the University of Southampton was the first university to award Tim Berners-Lee an honorary degree in recognition of his role in developing the World Wide Web. In 2003 he was awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work on global communications. ‘Through his vision in inventing and developing the Web and ensuring that it is freely available and accessible for all, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has transformed all aspects of our world,’ said Professor Bill Wakeham, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton. ‘I very much look forward to welcoming him to Southampton as a member of our School of Electronics and Computer Science, and to the significant and substantial collaborations that will follow as a result of his appointment.’

The future of personal identification technologies such as biometrically-based ID cards and their capabilities to meet current expectations will be addressed at a seminar on The Challenge of Biometrics being held next Tuesday (14 December) at the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in London.

Biometrics are automated methods of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are: face, fingerprints, handwriting, iris, retinal, and walk. The seminar will address the spread of these technologies - from border control applications to national ID programmes - and address whether they are ready for what is expected of them.

Professor Mark Nixon of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, one of the UK's earliest researchers in this field, will deliver a presentation entitled Advances in new biometrics. He will discuss some of the newer biometrics such as gait, recognition by ear and identification by tapping, and assess how each performs and contributes generally to advances in the field.

Professor Nixon's group is well known for its pioneering role in the development of new biometrics, from face recognition to, more recently, gait and ears as a biometric.

He comments: 'There has been constant innovation in the short history of biometrics and it is crucial for deployment and performance enhancement. For example, we started out by realizing that people could be recognised by their faces and then by the way that they walk. Now we are finding that we can break that down further into the exact components that provide most recognition; in our gait research we are finding that it's not always the parts that move that provide us with the most information.'

University of Southampton spin-out company Perpetuum Ltd has appointed technology business specialist Roy Freeland as its Chief Executive Officer. The company, which has been founded by academics at the University's world-class School of Electronics and Computer Science, harvests kinetic energy from the environment and puts it to use in a range of innovative ways. 'This is very exciting technology,' said Roy Freeland. 'Thanks to the work at the School, Perpetuum has the opportunity to become a market leader in providing self-sustaining power sources for sensor systems. Everyone I have spoken to is enthusiastic about its possibilities. It is environmentally friendly and has many applications in so many areas.' Roy has more than 20 years experience at senior level for leading companies in the international automotive, defence and aerospace markets. He has also recently been mentoring young companies at the University's Chilworth Science Park. 'In recent years there has been a significant change in the quality of support from the University in establishing new businesses, he commented. 'I have taken advantage of the incubation support offered by SETsquared, which gave us a terrific start. 'Being involved in a spin-out from the School of Electronics and Computer Science is very exciting, due to the quality of the research expertise on which the company can draw,' he added. Using cutting edge technologies, Perpetuum researchers have developed small, inexpensive wireless sensor systems with RF data transmission. The patented vibration harvesting microgenerator produces sufficient energy from relatively low levels of vibration to power the systems so they require no external power supplies or batteries. Among many potential applications, these could be used to monitor stress and find dangerous fractures by being embedded in structures such as bridges and aircraft, or monitor the health of rotating parts and moving vehicles. Future planned developments could lead to an everlasting heart pacemaker. Sensors in use at present are limited by the need for a power supply or batteries, but Perpetuum's version will capture its own energy from the environment. For example, a sensor on a railway track could reduce rail accidents by using vibration energy harvested from passing trains to report faults in the track or rolling stock over the mobile phone network. Work is under way to miniaturise the device to the size of a 5p coin. The company was formed by Professor Neil White together with ECS colleagues Steve Beeby, Nick Harris and John Tudor. Professor White said: 'The technology to power microsystems from the environment will have wide-ranging applications across many industries, where it will help to reduce maintenance and pollution from discarded batteries.' 'This technique has the potential to be world-beating in terms of power output,' said Roy Freeland.

Perpetuum has already received funding from specialist financiers IP2IPO and Sulis.

The University of Southampton is to make all its academic and scientific research output freely available.

A decision by the University to provide core funding for its Institutional Repository establishes it as a central part of its research infrastructure, marking a new era for Open Access to academic research in the UK. Until now, the databases used by universities to collect and disseminate their research output have been funded on an experimental basis by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee). The University of Southampton is the first in the UK to announce that it is transitioning its repository from the status of an experiment to an integral part of the research infrastructure of the institution.

‘This decision by the University marks a real milestone in the Open Access initiative,’ says Dr Leslie Carr. ‘At Southampton we have a significant headstart since we created the EPrints software that is used by many UK universities, but we expect and indeed hope that others will soon give similar status to their own archives.’ Dr Carr is Technical Director of the open source GNU EPrints software, which is now used by around 150 repositories worldwide. Southampton established its repository (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/) in 2002 as part of the JISC TARDis project (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure), to explore issues surrounding the Open Access paradigm. The repository provides a publications database with full text, multimedia and research data.

‘We see our Institutional Repository as a key tool for the stewardship of the University’s digital research assets,’ said Professor Paul Curran, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. ‘It will provide greater access to our research, as well as offering a valuable mechanism for reporting and recording it.

‘The University has been committed to Open Access for many years. The fact that we are now supporting it with core funding is another tangible step towards its full achievement.’

The Southampton repository will now become a service of the University Library in partnership with the University’s Information Systems Services and its School of Electronics and Computer Science (who host the JISC-funded software development team).

Acknowledging the success of the partnership between the Library, Information Systems Services and the Schools, the Librarian, Dr Mark Brown, said: ‘Collaboration between services and academic groups has been the key element in the success of the project. The Institutional Repository will now become an integral part of the electronic library service at Southampton.’

Professor Stevan Harnad, regarded by many as the founder of the Open Access movement, has been successfully leading the debate from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science over a number of years, and has argued forcefully for its adoption by the academic community worldwide. The School of Electronics and Computer Science already has the most populated online institutional archive in the UK.

Tony Hey, Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and a senior member of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours List.

Professor Hey, who is currently on secondment from the School as Director of the UK's e-Science Programme, was honoured for his services to science.

A former Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Southampton, Tony Hey is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre, which has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory.

As the Director of the UK e-Science Programme, Tony Hey is currently excited by the vision of the increasingly global scientific collaborations being enabled by the development of the next generation 'Grid' middleware. The successful development of the Grid will have profound implications for industry and he is much involved with industry in the move towards OpenSource/OpenStandard Grid software.

Tony Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He is the author of two popular science books: The Quantum Universe and Einstein's Mirror. Most recently he edited the Feynman Lectures on Computation for publication, and a companion volume entitled Feynman and Computation.

Open Access to scientific and academic research publications is one of the hottest topics currently engaging academic and knowledge managers, publishers, and libraries. The University of Southampton has considerable experience and expertise in making its academic research freely available online, and is now offering that experience to other UK institutions in the form of two free one-day workshops, being held in Southampton at the end of this month (Open Access Institutional Repositories: Leadership, Direction and Launch). The first workshop, aimed at archive administrators and those offering technical support for institutional repositories, will take place on Tuesday 25 January and will provide hands-on practical sessions on building and configuring repositories. The second workshop, geared towards pro-vice chancellors, senior librarians, repository managers and researchers, will take place the next day, Wednesday 26 January. This high-profile event will feature speakers from key players such as Research Councils UK (RCUK), the British Library, the Wellcome Trust, and other influential UK policy developers. The day will end with a research colloquium on Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years, led by Professor Stevan Harnad, regarded as the founder of the Open Access movement, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the world's leading experts in knowledge management technologies. The University of Southampton announced last month that it is to make all of its academic and scientific output freely available and that it is transitioning its own repository from the status of an experiment to an integral part of the research infrastructure of the institution. '2005 is poised to be a breakthrough year for Open Access,' said Dr Leslie Carr, Technical Director of the open source GNU EPrints software initiative, 'particularly for institutional repositories in the UK. At Southampton we have a significant head start since we created the EPrints software that is used by many UK universities. These workshops are intended to pave the way for other institutions who will inevitably be establishing their own open source archives. 'We are providing these events free of charge in order that as many people as possible can attend, and also in the collegial spirit of the open source community. This is a subject which all institutions need to know about and to plan for, and we are anticipating a high level of interest.' The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been investigating the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional repositories.

There is currently no standard means of proving the source of computer-generated information. There is therefore no way of auditing the information or tracing how a particular result was achieved. However, a new EU-wide project will provide a means of tracing the origins of computer-generated information, as well as creating a standard for the industry. The EU Provenance Project, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme, borrows its name from the trusted, documented history of works of art, and aims to extend this concept to the computer science industry. According to Professor Luc Moreau of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, the Provenance project aims to provide mechanisms and standard industry software which will allow information generated and managed within a grid infrastructure to be proven and trusted. This information will be documented in such a way that it can be inspected and validated by authorised users who can also ensure that it has not been tampered with during the process. 'This will be a very important service for organizations in the aerospace and organ transplant industries, in particular, said Professor Moreau. 'It will also have applications in the travel industry and could be very useful in tracing the source of spam.' Partners in the Provenance team are: School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton; IBM UK Ltd; Cardiff University (Welsh eScience Centre); Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft - und Raumfahrt s.V, Universitat Politechica de Catalunya; and Computer and Automation Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The need for a nationwide policy to ensure that UK researchers and their universities derive the benefits of providing Open Access (OA) to their research will be examined next week at a two-day workshop on institutional self-archiving at the University of Southampton.

During the event, Open Access Institutional Repositories: Leadership Direction and Launch, academics from the University of Southampton will share their experience and expertise in making scholarly and scientific research freely available online. They will be joined by research funders and other universities and institutions to discuss the way forward to 100 per cent OA in the UK.

The first day (Tuesday 25 January) takes the form of a hands-on tutorial on creating and using Institutional OA Repositories. Many universities will be represented at this event, which will enable them to benefit from the experience already gained at Southampton.

The second day (Wednesday 26 January), will be an all-day symposium opened by Robert Campbell, President of Blackwell Publishing. He will consider how author self-archiving of journal articles might affect learned society journals, and reflect on the balance between providing OA to articles and protecting the journals that publish them.

Other speakers include:

*Bill Hubbard of Nottingham University, who will describe the SHERPA Directory of Publishers' policies on author self-archiving (92 per cent of journals have already given it their green light); *Stephane Goldstein of Research Councils UK and Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust will report new directions in research funders' policies on the self-archiving of funded research in institutional and central OA repositories, and *Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd. will report the results of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) surveys on author OA self-archiving practices and attitudes as well as on central versus institutional self-archiving.

The OA policies at the University of Southampton and a number of other institutions (including the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries, the British Library, and the Arts and Humanities data Service) will also be presented.

The high-profile event ends with a research colloquium - Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years - in which Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a leading expert in knowledge technology, will illustrate the potential power and benefits of institutional OA repositories in maximising and measuring research impact, productivity and progress.

There are two roads to OA: the 'golden road' of publishing in an OA journal (author-institution pays publication costs instead of user-institution) and the 'green road' of publishing in a non-OA journal but also self-archiving the article in an OA archive.

Professor Harnad comments: 'Only 5 per cent of journals are OA journals (gold) today, but over 90 per cent have a green policy on author self-archiving. However only about 15 per cent of articles have as yet been self-archived. To reach 100 per cent OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' institutions and research funders.'

Professor Shadbolt will describe how a new generation of web technologies allows researchers to trace and analyze the connections between their publications. He says: 'Publications will be threaded in ways that allow a researcher to find related work, to understand the impact it is having, and even to detect new trends and emerging concepts in an area. Open Access and self archiving are key developments in facilitating a truly global information infrastructure.'

A team of researchers led by Dr Pier Sazio of the Optoelectronics Research Centre and Dr David Smith of Physics and Astronomy has won funding for a four year nanotechnology project under the Research Councils UK Basic Technology Research Programme. This innovation will result in structures with unique optical and electronic properties, with a number of diverse applications ranging from integrated circuits to chemical sensors. The project, which runs for four years, is a collaborative effort involving scientists from four University of Southampton departments as well as researchers in the Chemistry departments at the Universities of Nottingham and Manchester. The project involves using a new form of chemical vapour deposition to enable the right types of growth in the pores. Professor Parker designed and implemented the four low-pressure chemical vapous deposition systems housed in the Innos clean-room.