Researchers at the University of Southampton have produced an interim report on agent technology on which they are inviting feedback from industry.

The AgentLink III consultation document, which is available from Professor Michael Luck at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), co-ordinator of the initiative, sets out a roadmap which aims to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in agent technology. AgentLink’s role is to promote research, development and deployment of autonomous, problem-solving computational entities across industry and academia.

The document describes current research initiatives and deployment of agent technologies and presents the challenges posed by new Grid computing and web technologies.

Professor Luck commented: ‘One of our goals in this interim report is to predict the future of agent technologies. This document is only the first stage in the process of developing AgentLink’s 2005 roadmap. Its purpose is twofold: first as a marker, laying down the preliminary findings of the initial work undertaken on the roadmap, and second as a call to the wider community to engage in the process of developing the content of the final, more substantial document.’

The public consultation and content solicitation period ends on 31 May 2005.

Professor Tony Hey is to join Microsoft Corporation as a corporate vice president to co-ordinate their Technical Computing Initiative. He will work across the company to co-ordinate Microsoft’s efforts to collaborate with the scientific community worldwide. Currently Director of the UK’s e-Science Programme, Tony Hey has been a member of staff of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) since 1986, and was Head of School from 1994 to 1999. He played a critical role in building the School into one of the UK’s leading academic departments, and has retained his Chair in the School throughout his period of secondment to UK e-Science. ‘This is wonderful news,’ said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of ECS, ‘and I am delighted to send our warmest congratulations to Tony on behalf of the School. His energy, vision, and sheer ability to make things happen will be of huge benefit to Microsoft and to future collaboration with researchers worldwide. At Southampton we are very glad that Tony will be retaining his Chair in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and his strong links with the School and the University.’ Professor Hey is 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. In the New Year Honours List (2005) he received the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for his services to science. ‘Today computation plays a critical role in advancing research across almost every field of science, yet far too often scientists must build all their own programming infrastructures and research their own algorithms to help advance their research effort,’ said Professor Hey. ‘By collaborating with the scientific community, I am confident that some of Microsoft’s advanced technologies can be used to accelerate their rate of discover.’ He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s and 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 (now the IT Innovation 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.

Museum curators and researchers will soon be able to investigate and study works of art in multiple museums and galleries without leaving their desks.

This development is made possible by the SCULPTEUR project, which was completed this month. The project, which is the first of its kind, has unlocked the digital potential of the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musees de France and the Musee de Cherbourg.

Over a three-year period, computer scientists from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science and IT Innovation Centre worked in conjunction with other project partners, to find new ways for the associated museums and galleries to search, explore and share their rich multimedia collections.

The drive for museums to broaden their online services and to share their digital collections has meant that there is a new desire to unlock their internal repositories and make them more accessible to others.

Dr Matthew Addis of IT Innovation commented: 'There is a wealth of new opportunities for museums and galleries to make extended use of their digital collections and to provide new online services to the community. However, many barriers exist due to immaturity of technology, lack of standards and best practice and difficulties in combining information from multiple sources within a museum or when distributed across the Web.'

SCULPTEUR has used Semantic Web technology to apply a combination of knowledge engineering, content-based analysis and digital library interoperability, which means that rich sources of information on cultural heritage can be easily found within multiple distributed collections. Dr Kirk Martinez of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, added: 'Users of museum collections don't always know how to describe exactly what they are looking for, or instead they might want to explore a particular topic, for example how different materials and techniques have been used by a group of artists. Up until now, there has been no way to search museum collections by content such as 3D shape, or navigate by concepts. The work we have done on this project will help them search and browse in new ways.'

According to James Stevenson, Photographic Manager at the Victoria and Albert Museum: 'SCULPTEUR gives those searching digital archives new techniques that enrich the creativity of both the visitor and the museum professional. The traditional way for digital librarians to search image databases by text is often restricting and frustrating. SCULPTEUR liberates these restrictions.'

UKUUG (UK Unix and Open Systems User Group) has made its 2005 Award to Christopher Gutteridge of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, for his work on the Open Archive Software: GNU EPrints.

Christopher, who has been a systems programmer and web developer since 1997, has been developing and supporting GNU EPrints 2 package over the last four years. The package is now used worldwide in universities and research institutions to enable researchers to share their research effectively, via the web, and to provide accessibility to scientific findings.

‘EPrints is both a practical tool and the crystallization of a philosophy,’ said Christopher. ‘It enables research to be accessible to all, and provides the foundation for all academic institutions to create their own research repositories.’

The School of Electronics and Computer Science has been one of the prime movers in the global movement towards open access publishing. The University of Southampton is the first UK university to announce that it would be establishing its own institutional repository and requiring all its academic staff to self-archive their research.

The UKUUG awards an annual prize to give particular recognition to the development of free and open source software in the UK. As part of his prize Christopher wins a trip to the Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon.

The UKUUG judges also noted as 'highly commended' Dr Thomas Leonard, also of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, for his work as primary author of the free software projects ROX Desktop (a graphical desktop for Linux and Unix type system, which he created to combine the elegance of the filer-centric RISC OS with the power of Linux and Zero Install.

The development of the Semantic Grid will be addressed at an international conference next week, highlighting its progress towards a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation which will enable flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale.

In his invited talk on The Semantic Grid: Past, Present and Future at the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference in Heraklion, Greece, on Wednesday 1 June, Professor David De Roure, Head of Grid and Pervasive Computing at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will describe his vision of a large-scale, self-managing, collaborative Grid and the advances that are being made towards its realisation.

He will trace the development of Grid computing from recognition of its potential role in the need for a common IT infrastructure in 2001 - which resulted in the e-Science programme, through the realisation that in order to be effective in this scenario it would need to be merged with Semantic Web technologies, leading ultimately to the creation of the Semantic Grid. Professor De Roure will highlight some key indicators of success including: the innovative application of five new technologies which include web services, metadata, ontologies and reasoning, semantic web services and software agents; Semantic Grid projects in every continent and 16,000 hits for the term “Semantic Gridâ€? on Google.

Professor De Roure commented: ‘Semantic Grid computing has allowed us to bring resources together to achieve something that was not previously possible. We now look forward to working on some of the remaining challenges, which include for example the intersection between the grid and the physical world through pervasive computing devices and the self-management, self-optimisation and self-healing (so called ‘autonomic’ behaviour) necessary for large scale distributed computing.’

A summary of Professor De Roure’s talk is available.

Computer science students at ECS have spent the last semester working on a project to help Southampton International Airport manage the many obstacles that might infringe on flight paths around the runway. The Airport needs to keep track of thousands of permanent obstacles such as buildings, motorway signs, lights, and trees, that might affect the safety of flight paths. Since standard industry systems are large and expensive, aimed at major airports, ECS students on the second-year Software Engineering Group Project were set the task of developing solutions. The results of all the group projects were presented to John Hamshare, Airside Compliance and Planning Manager at Southampton International Airport, and Chris Thomas of IBM UK’s Hursley Research Lab, which donated the Thinkpads to the ECS students. ‘The students have impressed me very much with their understanding of the problems associated with evaluating priority “obstaclesâ€?, and the quality of their products is outstanding,’ said John Hamshare. ‘Each group provided special features, all of which I found useful and interesting. ‘I have used an earlier version of the product to help me with safeguarding issues and expect to make use of it for some time’, he added. The winners, photographed with John Hamshare and Chris Thomas, were: Anthony Ambrus; Donna Belsey; Paul Brown; and Sze Lee, and they will now go forward to the Thinkpad Challenge finals in September. The students were led by the Course Team--Mike Poppleton, Bob Walters and Martin Szomszor.

A lively new website for schools, launched this week, focuses on telecommunications, providing a complete overview of the subject, capturing its excitement, and highlighting its many exciting opportunities.

The new M2M (Morse code to Multiplexing) website aims to brief students on everything they need to know for the telecommunications part of the GCSE examinations in Physics, Balanced Science and Applied Science and A-level Physics.

M2M has been produced by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Public Engagement in Science programme.

Dr Averil Macdonald, Co-ordinator of the M2M project commented: 'The telecommunications section of the school syllabus covers real cutting-edge science and often it's so new that few school textbooks cover the topic well. We are providing a complete overview of the subject for the students and their teachers. But we are also going further to show just how exciting this area of research is and how many opportunities there are in this field.'

The website, www.m2m.ecs.soton.ac.uk , includes revision guides, frequently asked questions and answers, quizzes for students to test themselves and exam tips. Students will be able to learn essential facts about optical fibres, telecommunications and lasers through animations that show how things work instead of relying on wordy explanations. Students can also take an interactive virtual tour of a laboratory where optical fibres are made.

The website simplifies the highly technical world of telecommunications by presenting key facts in an interesting and entertaining way, for example, it states that one strand of fibre is thinner than a human hair but 10 times stronger than steel of the same length and diameter; that light travels so fast in a fibre that it can go to New Zealand and back in 0.1 second and that one square inch of optical fibre could lift 216 six-tonne elephants.

There is also information about student life, how to find the right university course, and what it's like to be working at the cutting edge of science.

M2M was prepared by Professor James Wilkinson, Dr Alun Vaughan, and Dr Dan Hewak.

A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional repository.

The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'.

The new results are being reported this week at the International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement.

The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296 respondents. The main findings are:

* The vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would comply willingly with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply (highest willingness, US: 88 per cent; UK: 83 per cent; lowest, China: 58 per cent).

* 49 per cent of respondents had already self-archived at least one article in the previous three years

* 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of self-archiving

* Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest rate of self-archiving in the UK

* Only 20 per cent of authors who self-archived reported any degree of difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9 per cent with subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent papers.

* Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the most papers

* Researchers' primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited)

In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print archive which has over 300,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv, did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed encouraged it.

'These results are hugely important,' said Stevan Harnad, 'and will be highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly self-archive if they were asked to do so.

'Universities and research-funders who have hesitated about requiring this now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'

On the critical question of whether the optimal route for self-archiving is the central one (as favoured by the US National Institutes of Health) or the distributed institutional model (favoured by the UK), Professor Harnad says that the JISC/Key Perspectives reports provide strong support for the UK Parliamentary Select Committee, which specifically proposed distributed institutional self-archiving. This is now likely to form the basis of a recommendation from Research Councils UK (RCUK), which has been considering the future of Open Access to UK-funded research output.

In the first project of its kind, school students will have the chance to design compounds with anti-malarial potential.

The University's Schools of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Chemistry,in conjunction with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Reading, have set up the Schools Malaria Project website (http://emalaria.soton.ac.uk) which hosts a web-based browser interface similar to that used by drug companies. Students are invited to register for admission to the site where they will learn more about the disease. They will also be able to research approaches to combating it and develop new molecules with anti-malarial potential.

Students will be using real drug-design tools and will be guided through the various stages of the drug-design process, right from their initial sketches of molecules to docking of the structure into the proposed active site to establish if it is a good 'fit'. They will also be able to consult with other students and university researchers and compare their progress with other schools through a group-scoring table.

Dr Jeremy Frey of the University's School of Chemistry comments: 'This type of exercise has never been made available to school students before. We believe that there is a very real chance that some of the compounds that they come up with will be made.'

This e-science project, which will be launched in September to sixth form colleges in Hampshire, is designed to increase young people's interest in science and the material is aligned with the A-level Chemistry syllabus. Dr Frey added: 'We need to change the poor impression young people have of science and this is widely recognised as essential for the future of the UK science and technology base. We have chosen to focus initially on just the pre- and post-GCSE group, with a longer term aim to carry this further down the educational system and similarly to widen it out to the general public.'

The Schools Malaria Project is funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing programme.

Sensor technologies geared towards understanding glacier dynamics and floodplains were exhibited at The Royal Academy of Engineering Annual Soirée and exhibition on Monday 27 June.

The GLACSWEB and FloodNet projects, which were both developed by scientists at the University of Southampton's Schools of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) and Geography, demonstrate advances in pervasive computing and illustrate how networks of wireless sensor probes can be used to measure environmental conditions.

In the case of GLACSWEB, a network of probes have been installed in the sedimentary base of Europe's largest glacier at Briksdalsbreen in Norway so that the team could learn more about climate change through recording glacier behaviour.

The FloodNet project, which has completed its first phase, involved installing a wireless sensor network at specific points around a stretch of river in Essex. The sensor nodes collected information about the local environment which was fed back to the University of Southampton so that it could be used to model flood simulations to provide early warning of the threat of flooding.

Professor David De Roure, ECS's expert in Pervasive Computing, commented: 'We are very proud to be able to showcase these two projects based on pervasive computing. This is just the beginning. Pervasive computing devices provide an exciting opportunity for intelligent sensing of the natural environment.

'Continued improvements in technology will mean smaller, lower power and lower cost devices,' he added. 'Recent research has created novel methods for harvesting energy from the environment to provide self-powered microsystems, giving a glimpse of the degree of pervasiveness the future may hold.'

The GLACSWEB and FloodNeT projects are based in the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and funded by the DTI Next Wave Technologies and Markets Programme.