It was announced last week that four members of the School had been awarded Personal Chairs. In addition to the four new appointments: Professor Sheng Chen, Professor Paul Lewis, Professor Manfred Oper, and Professor Mark Zwolinski, Dr Hugh Davis, Head of the Learning Technologies Group in the School, has been appointed as University Director of Education.

Professor Sheng Chen is a member of the Communications Group. His research interests include adaptive signal processing for communications, modelling and identification of nonlinear systems, learning theory and neural networks, finite-precision digital controller design, evolutionary computation methods and optimization.

Professor Paul Lewis is a member of the Intelligence, Agents Multimedia Group. His research centres on the broad area of multimedia knowledge management; in particular, problems in image and video processing and analysis, multimedia annotation and semantic description of media.

Professor Manfred Opper of the Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems Group researches complex adaptive systems, using ideas and techniques of Statistical Physics which allow systems to be studied with many degrees of freedom. In recent years he has applied these ideas to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for probabilistic data models in Machine Learning.

Professor Mark Zwolinski of the Electronics Systems Design Group has research interests including the design of robust digital systems and modelling of mixed-signal systems. His book Digital Design with VHDL has been translated into Chinese and appeared in many different editions. He is also co-author of a book on Circuit Simulation.

Dr Hugh Davis takes on the new role of University Director of Education. He is Head of the Learning Technologies Group in the School, and was previously Director of Learning and Teaching for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests are in learning technology, and the ways in which technology can improve the learning experience, and his current focus is on the use of web and grid services to build an e-Learning Framework.

An e-Science project which is helping chemists to analyse and store the massive quantity of data being produced by modern combinatorial techniques, has been awarded additional funding of £415,000 by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

CombeChem is one of the most ambitious uses of Semantic Web and Grid computing. Led by the School of Chemistry, the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) at the University of Southampton, the project will facilitate the measurement, storage and reuse of information on thousands of chemical compounds.

Current storage and processing systems in chemistry laboratories are overwhelmed by new techniques that produce chemistry data on thousands of compounds, in the time taken to synthesize and measure just one compound in the past.

For effective investigation and identification of new active materials, drugs and catalysts, it is essential this information is gathered and stored logically so that it can be retrieved for later analysis, reused in future experiments, and automatically related to other information.

Dr Jeremy Frey from the School of Chemistry commented: 'CombeChem's success will ultimately impact on the design of materials through the prediction of their properties and the identification of suitable compounds in a variety of applications. It will also allow chemical information to be registered on the web and avoid chemists having to reinvent the wheel.'

The School of Chemistry is an ideal e-Science test bed to exploit the data in a Grid-based environment. The team is creating a smart lab which uses Grid computing to facilitate co-operative interactions between groups of chemists and other users.

This lab will have digital Tablet PCs instead of paper lab-books so that research information is made instantly available, as demonstrated by the Smart Tea project (http://ww.smarttea.org/). It will apply distributed computing networks to allow the team to compile a large database of molecules, have Comberobots to scan the database, and applications to carry out multiple simulations to understand the potential interaction between molecules.

Professor David De Roure of the School of Electronics and Computer Science commented: 'Through CombeChem we have built a very significant Semantic Grid resource, providing an exciting glimpse of the future infrastructure for research. This is a tremendous platform for innovation both in chemistry research and in computer science.'

The final phase will be completed within four years. Additional funding, building on the base provided by the EPSRC Platform grant, is being sought with current interest from the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sector

An ECS researcher whose PhD results have already been patented by the University has been awarded a prestigious five-year research fellowship.

Dr Huda Abdel Wahab Abdel Rahim El Mubarek of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton has been awarded a prestigious five-year research fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) jointly with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This is the first time that this award has been made to a female member of the University.

During her fellowship Dr El Mubarek will be researching novel methods of dopant diffusion suppression in semiconductors. This is a further development of the doctoral research which she completed in Southampton in 2004 with Professor Peter Ashburn, in which she has shown that a properly optimised fluorine implant is able to completely suppress boron transient enhanced diffusion in silicon and silicon-germanium and significantly reduce boron thermal diffusion. These important results have been patented by the University of Southampton and will now be commercially exploited by Innos Limited.

Dr El Mubarek came to Southampton from Sudan in 1996 as an undergraduate student, drawn by the reputation of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. In 1999 she graduated top of the first class honours category in her degree cohort in Electronic Engineering and won numerous prizes for her achievements, including the Dean's Award for Best Performance throughout her degree.

'I'm delighted to have received the RAEng/EPSRC Fellowship,' she said, 'and I am looking forward to the exciting opportunity which it will give me to continue with my research here for the next five years.'

'Southampton is simply the best place for me to undertake this research,' she added, 'because of the facilities in the University and the Innos cleanroom and the team. It's a very friendly environment and I am very happy to be here.'

Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK’s national academy for the promotion of engineering and technology.

Professor Jennings is Deputy Head of School (Research) and Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group. He is Chief Scientific Officer of Lost Wax and Director of the newly established BAE Systems/EPSRC Strategic Partnership in Distributed Data and Information Systems.

‘I am proud to receive this honour from the Royal Academy of Engineering,’ he said, ‘which I feel also reflects the achievements of the many research collaborators and students I have worked with in recent years.’

Professor Jennings is one of the world’s leading experts on agent-based computing. He helped pioneer the application of multi-agent technology; and developed some of the first real-world systems. This focus led him into the areas of agent-based software engineering and the Semantic Grid. More recently, his focus has been on automated bargaining, auctions, markets, mechanism design, coalition formation, decentralised control, and trust and reputation.

He has received a number of distinguished academic awards, including: the Computers and Thought Award in 1999, an IEE Achievement Medal in 2000, and the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2003. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the European artificial intelligence association (ECCAI), and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC). He has published over 275 articles and 6 books on various facets of agent-based computing and holds 3 patents.

At the age of 38, Professor Jennings is the second youngest Fellow in the Academy.

Professor Wendy Hall has become the first female Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and plans to work with the Academy to attract more women to the discipline.

According to Professor Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, who was elected at the AGM of the Academy on Wednesday 6 July, there is a pressing need for more women engineers--not only to achieve a more healthy gender balance in the industry but because society needs their input in design so that products can be used satisfactorily by both sexes.

Professor Hall, who has been a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2000, will succeed Sir Duncan Michael and will hold the post for three years. As well as developing her own role as Senior Vice President she will deputise for Academy President Lord Broers when required.

She plans to develop initiatives to influence public perceptions of engineering and to build on the impetus created by Lord Broers' Reith Lectures on The Triumph of Technology to communicate the significance of engineering to wider audiences. She also plans to encourage more interdisciplinary working across engineering and orchestrate campaigns to encourage more women into engineering.

She commented: 'I am very proud to be an engineer and to have been appointed to this post which puts me in an excellent position to improve public perceptions of engineering so that more young men and women are encouraged to join the discipline.

'Women, in particular, need to be represented in every aspect of industry; otherwise products get designed purely from the male perspective. This might not matter so much with the design of a bridge, but take, for example, a car. Volvo recently put an all-female team together to see what difference their perspective made to the design of a car. We need to encourage more engineering companies to encourage the active involvement of women in all aspects of their business.'

For further information contact Joyce Lewis: 023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk

A University of Southampton scientist has just identified ears as a potential biometric signature but the fact that they can be concealed by hair means further research is needed.

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, has just published a paper entitled Force field feature extraction for ear biometrics in the publication Computer Vision and Image Understanding in which he presents the case for the use of ears as a biometric.

According to Professor Nixon, ears have certain advantages over the more established biometrics as they have a rich and stable structure that is preserved from birth to old age and instead of aging they just get bigger. The ear also does not suffer from changes in facial expression and it is firmly fixed in the middle of the side of the head against a predictable background, unlike face recognition which usually requires the face to be captured against a controlled background.

Taking into account all of these properties, Professor Nixon and his team decided to assess the ear as a potential biometric. They developed a new computerised force field transformation which allowed them to capture the ear image in a smooth dome- shaped surface whose special shape enabled them to identify the features more clearly.

They applied this technique to a small database of ears and initial results show promising results in ear recognition. Professor Nixon comments: 'This research proves that ears work as a biometric. However, there are drawbacks and one of them is that ears can be concealed by hair. We need devices that can integrate multiple biometrics. We are working on some of these at the moment and will be reporting on them soon.'

Professor Nixon is currently working on a paper on 'How does gait change with age?' which he will be presenting at the Fifth International Conference on Audio- and Video-based Biometric Person Authentication 2005, July 20 - 22, 2005, Hilton Rye Town, Rye Brook, NY 10573 on 22 July.

This week pupils from the south of England, armed with the latest handheld gadgets, brought history to life in stories they wrote in the grounds of Chawton House, the Elizabethan manor house that once belonged to Jane Austen's brother, Edward. Jane lived on the Chawton estate from 1809 to 1817, her most prolific writing period.

A group of Year 5 students from Whiteley Primary School in Hampshire was the first to trial new technology developed by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

As a result of a hypothetical experience constructed by their teachers, the pupils were guided on the art of storytelling by information which appeared on their PDA (Personal Digital Assistant).

Teachers left instructions which flashed up on the PDAs at various places in the grounds of the house, such as the walled garden or on the main drive up to the house, to record a dialogue between two people arriving at the house for the first time. The pupils could also play audio clips describing parts of the grounds and record all of their own annotations. All of this information could be replayed in the classroom at a later date.

Professor David De Roure of ECS commented: 'The main emphasis of this first study has been on using the landscape as a writing aide. This is the first time that scientists at ECS have worked on deploying such advanced technology to improve literacy rather than science. This is an on-going process and we are planning to work with Whiteley School to develop some of these concepts further. We are also working on other projects with Chawton House.'

Mrs Pat Bradley, Headteacher from Whiteley Primary School. commented: 'This is a good example of using new technology to improve our children's learning. The ICT tools have allowed adults to help develop the children's literacy skills and the children have been highly motivated by the approach.'

The system was designed by an interdisciplinary team across four universities. Special navigation technology developed by the University of Bristol 'pinged' location information to the PDAs, and researchers from the University of Sussex were responsible for designing and analysing the experience. The system incorporated state-of-the-art software from the University of Nottingham and next-generation Web technologies developed in ECS.

The project is part of the Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton, was today named by the European Commission as one of the 22 eminent founding members of the new Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC).

The European Research Council is a new funding organization for frontier research across Europe, including science and technology, social sciences, and the humanities, which will be part of the Seventh Research Framework Programme (2007-13). The Scientific Council, an independent body representing the interests of science and research at the very highest level, will determine the ERC's scientific strategy.

The 22 scientist who make up the membership of the new ERC Scientific Council were chosen by an independent panel of high-level scientists, chaired by Lord Patten.

'It is a great honour to be chosen as a founding member of the Scientific Council,' said Professor Hall. 'This is an enormously important and timely initiative, and one that is strategically very significant for the future of European science and technology.

'The ERC will fund the best of European science and scholarship, and the opportunity to help shape Europe's research strategy through collaboration at such a high level is very exciting.'

The other UK member of the Scientific Council is Lord May of Oxford, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government.

Notes to Editors

1.The full announcement (embargoed 13.30 18 July 2005) from the European Commission is available at http://europa.eu.int/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/05/90&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

2.Wendy Hall, CBE, FREng, is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK and is currently Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). She was the founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Research Group in ECS. She has published over 300 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, multi-agent systems and knowledge technologies. She is currently senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Immediate Past President of the British Computer Society, a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, a member of the ACM Council, a member of IW3C2, a member of the Executive Committee of UKCRC and a non-executive Director of several companies and charitable trusts. She was awarded a CBE in 2000, and is a Fellow of the BCS, the IEE, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the City and Guilds of London Institute. A longer biography is available at http://www.ecs.soton.a! c.uk/~wh/

As computers become capable of storing a lifetime's worth of memories and researchers explore prosthetic memories for humans, scientists at the University of Southampton have set up a network to develop a better understanding of how memory works and how it might be augmented by technological developments.

The network, supported by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Memories for Life project, includes around 30 UK academics from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, information science and sociology, who will come together over a two-year period, in the hope that cross-fertilisation of ideas across the disciplines can lead to a more effective use of human and computerised memory.

As Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), one of the principal investigators, explains: 'People are-quite literally-their memories. Exploring opportunities for collaboration between scientists and engineers could have a real impact both on our understanding of human memory, and on associated technologies for memory management.'

Dr Kieron O'Hara, Senior Research Fellow in ECS and communications officer of the project, commented: 'There are many challenges ahead when it comes to memory. Humans are very good at linking memories about the same things; it is much harder for computers to do this. Some of the challenges which lie ahead could be in the development of prosthetic memories and the storing and retrieval of 70 years' worth of memories and all the aspects of trust and privacy that will this entail.'

According to Dr O'Hara, the network is seeking more psychologists, neurosciences and sociologists willing to share their knowledge of short-term and long-term memory and brain function so that it can be used to improve efficiency, recall and information management in an integrated way across various levels of human, personal, social and work domains.

Dr Hugh Davis and Su White (right), who along with Dr David Millard and Dr Mark Weal, have been awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award 2005 for their innovative Multimedia Systems final-year course in Computer Science on both the BSc and MEng programmes. The prize was formally awarded by the Vice-Chancellor at the ECS Graduation Ceremony on Thursday 28 July.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Awards have been established to recognize innovative teaching which embodies the University’s commitment to research, and which make a real difference to student learning. The Awards are also intended to showcase good teaching practice which can be translated to other subject disciplines, and will now become an annual feature at the University's Graduation ceremonies.

The Multimedia Systems course involves an ambitious project for the students: they have to choose a topic to research, produce a paper on their subject, and then present it at an authentic day-long conference, which they have to organize and manage themselves. The process involves anonymous peer review of the papers and the incorporate of feedback into the final presentations, which are then made to an audience which includes fellow students, staff, and invited participants from business and industry which has sponsored prizes.

Hugh Davis and Su White first conceived and designed this course for delivery in 2000, and the format has been enormously successful. It is now taught by David Millard and Mark Weal, and the innovative approach has already been embedded into teaching in other areas of the School, including the MEng individual research projects presentation.

It has been very popular with students, who not only have a real introduction to research methods and presentation, but who also develop other valuable skills in organizing the conference. ‘Research-led teaching is about more than researchers doing the teaching,’ said Hugh Davis. ‘We wanted to inspire our students with the same essence of curiosity and desire to communicate their understandings that drives researchers, and we wanted to make the experience as authentic as possible.’

This year’s conference was held at New College, University of Southampton. Siobhain Dales, a member of the Conference Committee, commended the hands-on, student-centered approach to learning: ‘It allowed me to get really involved in how a conference is organized and run, which was fascinating, immensely fun, and really challenging. Having worked through the Multimedia Systems course equipped me to produce a high-quality, well-referenced report.’

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Deputy Head of School (Education), commented: ‘This course is an excellent example of the really high-quality, innovative teaching which is one of the hallmarks of our degree programmes in ECS. The course is also very much enjoyed by our students, and so added to the highly positive outcomes of higher-level learning, we also see a great deal of enthusiasm and commitment generated from the students’ opportunity to showcase their work.’