A final-year computer science student has come up with a proposal to tag football players in an effort to improve the accuracy of offside decisions. While watching a football match, Jonathan Dunne, who has just completed his MEng in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, grew increasingly frustrated with rulings made by the Referee's Assistant and decided to base his final-year research project on how technology could be used to improve the accuracy of offside decisions.

He found that through using Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID), tags could be embedded on each player's kit and within the match ball. Each of the tags could then pass position data for each of the players and the ball to a central server which would perform the business logic of determining whether an offside infringement had taken place.

Jonathan compared this technology with other possibilities such as Satellite Tracking Technology and Video Content Analysis Technology and found that it was more accurate and affordable.

He commented: 'The offside rule in Association Football is complex and often Referee's Assistants make incorrect decisions which can cost a club not only a game, but potentially millions of pounds in lost revenue.

'There are many hurdles to overcome in order to employ technology to assist in the making of offside decisions, but as it stands at the moment, a solution based on RFID technology offers the best accuracy for position determination and therefore would provide the most accurate system.'

Professor Judith Bishop, graduate of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been named Distinguished Woman Scientist of the Year in South Africa.

Professor Bishop is both a graduate of ECS, having received her PhD in the 1970s, and a former member of staff, who taught in the School in the 1980s and 1990s. She is now based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria, and works on frameworks for distributed systems that prolong the lifetime of highly expensive software by enabling machine-dependent components to be monitored, identified and exchanged. Her innovative re-targeting methodology, pioneered on the Views system, has made possible the re-targetting of GUI software from Windows to Linux without rewriting. She is now working with Microsoft Research and a local company on the Nomad system, which will enable closed groups of collaborators to exchange information effectively in today’s mobile world when connectivity is essential, but not always there.

Judith Bishop began her career as a computer scientist at Rhodes University in 1970, and published her first paper before she was 21. She has always been at the front of her field of programming languages for distributed systems. She wrote the first BASIC compiler for ICL1900 computers in 1972, and was involved in the first Pascal compiler for 2900 computers while working on her PhD under David Barron in 1976. She joined the staff of ECS in 1988, and worked with Tony Hey’s group on the design of distribution models for Ada on transputers. She wrote the first Java textbook to become widely used and translated in 1997, and most recently one of the first C# textbooks in 2004.

Professor Bishop is the top NRF-rated woman computer scientist in South Africa and has published over 70 journal and conference papers. Her 15 books are available in six languages, and read worldwide. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Founding Fellow of the SA Institute of Computer Scientists, was awarded the prestigious IFIP Silver Core Medal for her services to the international IT community, and has been involved in grant-awarding and conference reviewing panels internationally for 20 years. She has active inter-government collaborations with Italy, German, Canada and Scotland. She has organized numerous conferences and workshops in South Africa, aimed at keeping postgraduates involved in cutting-edge research. She is keenly interested in computer science at schools and was chosen as the university expert involved in setting the new curriculum and assessment guidelines.

Professor Bishop lives in Brooklyn, Pretoria, and has two sons who both studied at the University of Pretoria. While in Southampton, she was an Akela of the Brookvale Cubs in Highfield, and has had a lifelong association with the Scouts. See http://www.cs.up.ac.za/~jbishop for more information.

The Women in Science Awards of South Africa recognize the contribution of outstanding women in scientific research, as well as the role of women in the development and sharing of knowledge that contributes to improvement in people's economic status and quality of life.

The University of Southampton has announced details of an intelligent fuse box which could manage domestic energy needs and result in significant daily savings.

The announcement comes in the wake of energy minister Malcolm Wicks' consultation paper on how to boost "micro generation" by homes, businesses and public buildings, on the basis of generating their own power and selling the surplus.

According to Dr Peter Wilson from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, such schemes do not always allow domestic users to be self-sufficient and to control their own energy requirements and can be problematic in terms of ensuring adequate power quality, reliability and safety of the generator.

Dr Wilson and his team have been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to research renewable energy further and have come up with an intelligent fuse box which could be installed in homes in parallel with existing domestic wiring and allow users to configure it to suit their needs.

A test project has begun locally where wireless sensors are being installed to monitor energy usage and collate this information centrally. The idea is that the fuse box will begin to adapt to the outside environment and become predictive; the researchers are also applying evolutionary algorithms so that the box begins to learn and respond to different scenarios, so that it makes the best use of energy. For example, the system would provide emergency power in the event of a local power outage enabling essential appliances to continue to be operated (telephones, refrigerators).

Energy will be generated through solar panels which are soon to be installed and a wind turbine which will be fitted on the research site. The plan is to analyse performance and results over a 12-month period; early predictions indicate that daily energy savings of 20 per cent will be made.

Dr Wilson commented: 'We have set out to keep this initiative as simple as possible so that it is accessible to the end-user. Ordinary people don't want to get involved in huge micro-grids; they just want to be self-sufficient and have a reliable supply. The intelligent fuse box will enable this - this is technology that is intended to be obtained and used by average domestic electricity users.'

Academics from some of the UK’s top universities are giving public support to the UK Research Councils’ (RCUK) proposed self-archiving policy.

The academics, who include inventor of the World Wide Web, Southampton Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, have co-signed a document refuting claims made by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) that the RCUK policy would have ‘disastrous consequences’ for journals.

The claims were made in a letter from ALPSP to RCUK in response to the RCUK’s position statement on Access to Research Outputs issued in June.

The rebuttal document, which has been signed by representatives from the universities of Southampton, Cambridge, Loughborough, Sheffield and Strathclyde and will be sent to RCUK by the end of the month, details the reasons why ALPSP’s claims are unsubstantiated, not least because evidence has shown that not only can journals co-exist and thrive alongside author self-archiving, they can actually benefit from it.

Authors, institutions, funders and publishers benefit from the increased visibility, use and impact of research articles that are self-archived and freely available to all.

In a covering letter to Professor Ian Diamond, Chair of the RCUK Executive Group, the academics state: ‘We believe that RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate self-archiving mandate, without further delay. That done, RCUK can meet ALPSP and other interested parties to discuss and plan how the UK Institutional Repositories can collaborate with journals and their publishers in sharing the new-found benefits of maximising UK research access and impact.’

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is featured in the Defying Distance exhibition currently on show at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The exhibition of photographs by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin focuses on the profound impact that telecommunications have had on the way we live and think. The series of portraits profiles the range of initiatives, and the visionary drive that have contributed to the development of the telecommunications industry in the United Kingdom. Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is a member of the ECS faculty, was named Greatest Briton 2004 for the invention of the World Wide Web. The Defying Distance exhibition runs until 25 September at the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and is sponsored by Deloitte.

David Swaffield, research assistant in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory has been awarded the 2005) Eric.O.Forster Young Scientist Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE. David received his award at the IEEE International Conference on Dielectric Liquids at Coimbra, from Robert Hebner, President of the IEEE’s Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS). It was based on a paper entitled “Partial discharge characterisation in liquid nitrogen composite systemsâ€? by D J Swaffield, P L Lewin, Y Tian, G Chen and S G Swingler. David has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the future use of liquid nitrogen as an electrical insulation for superconducting power apparatus under the supervision of Dr Paul Lewin and Dr George Chen. The Electrical Power Engineering Research Group in ECS has a long established reputation for its research into the potential application of high temperature superconductivity (HTS) to power plant. David’s research was funded by the EPSRC and concerned design issues relating to the development of terminations for a HTS high voltage cable. ‘Where Liquid Nitrogen is used both for electrical insulation as well as temperature control, it is important that its electrical properties are well understood because this will inevitably lead to optimised designs of future HTS high voltage plant’ said Dr Lewin. David has measured partial discharge activity in liquid nitrogen and for the first time has obtained images that relate to the actual discharge event. Based on David’s publications in this area he has also been invited to be a panellist, representing the UK cryogenic dielectric research community, at the First Cryodielectrics Workshop to be held as part of the IEEE 2005 Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Performance

The UK is losing around £1.5 billion annually in the potential impact of its scientific research expenditure, according to one of the key figures in the global open access publishing movement. Professor Stevan Harnad, Moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through the limitations of the current academic publishing environment.

'Research Councils UK (RCUK) spends £3.5 billion of Government money annually funding British science,' says Harnad. 'This results in around 130,000 articles published each year in research journals, but the publication alone does not reflect the return on the UK's investment.

'Research, if it has any value, must not only be published, but used, applied, and built upon by other researchers,' he continues. 'This "research impact" can be measured by the number of times an article is cited by other articles - the more accurate way to regard it is as a "citation impact".'

In an article published today ('Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment Research', http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11220), Harnad calculates the value of the citation impacts that are being lost to the UK each year by the inaccessibility of many research papers. 'A published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to be at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it was published,' he says. 'Today, the online age has made it possible for

authors to self-archive their publications by placing them on their own institutional website, thereby providing free access to the research to everyone who is interested.'

Harnad has been one of the most vocal and persuasive advocates of open access provision over many years, and he has recently seen widespread acceptance of his recommendations. He vigorously supports the proposal from RCUK that would require UK researchers to deposit (on their institutional website) the text of any journal article resulting from RCUK-funded research.

He reveals today that the calculations of the value of research impact to be gained by a universal policy of self-archiving indicates a figure of at least £1.5 billion's worth annually. 'This is actually a conservative estimate,' says Harnad. 'It also takes no account of the much wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry.'

He is calling for a full acceptance of the RCUK recommendation. 'We know that 90 per cent of journals already endorse author self-archiving,' he says, 'and that over 90 per cent of authors will comply.

'This is a historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world,' he concludes, 'showing how to maximize the return on public investment in research in the online era.'

A new sensor is being developed for the aerospace industry which will also have applications in medicine and the automotive industry. The sensor could be cheaper and more effective than others on the market.

Engineers from the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and Brunel University have been commissioned by Ellison Sensors International, based in Wales, to design a sensor to measure pressures in jet engines.

Research into traditional methods of pressure measurement, which use a foil gauge bonded into a diaphragm, revealed that factors such as temperature and age of the device can impair the accuracy of the measurement.

The new sensor, which is based on resonant sensing, replaces the foil track with a resonant sensing element. This is excited into resonance using screen-printed smart piezoelectric materials and offers significant improvements in measurement over traditional methods.

Andrew Frood, a PhD student at ECS commented: 'The applications of this sensor are both varied and exciting, ranging from sensors small enough to be inserted in a patient's blood stream giving a continuous readout of their blood pressure, to a sensor capable of monitoring the high pressures in a jet engine. The low cost of production could also open up new areas of mass deployment of the sensors bringing safety benefits such as cheap tyre pressure monitoring through sensors embedded in the tyres.'

Albert Ellison, Managing Director of Ellison Sensors International added: 'We are very excited about this pressure sensor which will work well in high temperature environments such as the aerospace industry. It will be the first sensor on the market capable of measuring a full range of pressures which will also make it suitable for a wide variety of applications.'

A prototype of the sensor is due to be available in six months' time with the final product available in 2007.

Scientists at the University of Southampton are developing a new framework which will facilitate more accurate probabilistic weather forecasting.

Over the years, many different techniques have been used in weather forecasting, from relatively simple observations of the sky to highly complex mathematical models run on the world's largest computers. Despite significant advances in this field, due to the unpredictability of the weather, forecasting remains a complex business.

Scientists are working towards a solution. Professor Manfred Opper from the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) has started work with Aston University, the University of Surrey and the Met Office to develop new methods to improve probabilistic weather prediction.

The researchers are starting their work with the assumption that all models have errors and that they will therefore need to adopt a probabilistic framework which will allow them to characterise not just the typical behaviour but also the uncertainty that results from model error and other sources. This approach will set them apart from most other environmental models which are essentially based on a deterministic view of the world.

Their first task will be to produce a computationally efficient algorithm that can propagate the uncertainty in the model state through space and time. Unlike many other approaches to quantifying uncertainty they will exploit the known physics when this is available, and be able to estimate unknown or imperfectly known model parameters from observations to augment this. Their methods will be tested on a range of simplified models which exhibit the same behaviour as weather forecast models, but have a controlled number of degrees of freedom.

Professor Opper commented: 'The need for probabilistic models is becoming increasingly recognised in the academic and research community across environmental science, but it is yet to make a strong showing in the more operational setting of commercial weather forecasting. Our work will enable a more principled and accurate approach to probabilistic forecasting to be considered.'

Dr Dan Cornford from Aston University added: 'We expect that the result of this research project will be a new framework for conducting probabilistic modelling for environmental systems, which will allow us to make more accurate probabilistic forecasts. We hope that this will bring improved weather and climate forecasts in the future, but it clearly also has applications beyond these areas.'