In a move to make scientific research more freely available, the University of Southampton is running a training course this week for those planning to set up institutional repositories.

The University, one of the key players in the global Open Access movement, has launched EPrints Services, to provide a range of advice, support, and practical help to all those planning to set up, or maintaining, an institutional research repository.

This unique service is being launched this week with a five-day course from 26 to 30 September. This training will be repeated in the UK in December, and a similar event will also be run in Bulgaria. Further information is available at http://www.eprints.org/services/

The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science leads the world in open access, software to support it, and its applications.

Its software, called EPrints, is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world. The EPrints software is open source and free and can be downloaded from the EPrints site.

'The launch of EPrints Services is particularly timely,' said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. 'In the UK, the Research Councils (RCUK) have announced that all research council-funded research must henceforth be placed in an institutional repository. Around the world, the success of the open access movement is ensuring that academics and universities want or, increasingly, are required, to make their research universally accessible to the wider community.

'EPrints provides the original solution for institutional repositories,' he continues. 'Now our wide-ranging experience and expertise gained over the years is being channelled into EPrints Services to ensure that new repositories are constructed to suit their institutions, and with appropriate policy and support systems designed as part of the package.'

Dr Carr points out that the advantages of having an institutional repository extend beyond research accessibility: 'We know that IRs increase citations and impact, and can therefore add powerful weight to research status and grant applications,' he said. 'They also enable data-sharing and enhance research opportunities, as well as accelerating the research cycle.'

'But every institution is unique,' he adds, 'and EPrints Services will ensure that these special features can be translated into a repository that best mirrors the institution.'

A roadmap which suggests how agent-based computing could develop over the next decade will be launched this month.

The Agentlink III Roadmap, which has been compiled by Professor Michael Luck at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will be launched at ATC, the Agent Technology Conference in Stockholm, on Tuesday 18 October 2005.

The document was developed as a result of an extensive 18-month consultation with experts in agent technology, including the 192 members of Agentlink III and experts in the Americas, Japan and Australasia.

The ultimate aim of this initiative is 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 ahead posed by new Grid computing and web technologies.

Professor Luck commented: 'This strategic technology roadmap is not intended as a prediction of the future. Instead, it is a reasoned analysis of the recent past and current state of agent technologies which has allowed us to present one possible development path for the technology.

'By doing this, we aim to identify the challenges and obstacles that will need to be overcome for progress to be made in research and development and for greater commercial adoption of the technology to occur.'

A copy of the AgentLink III Roadmap can be accessed at www.agentlink.org/roadmap.

A workshop which will bring together the world’s top researchers in pattern analysis will take place this week.

The Analysis of Patterns workshop, which will take place at the Centre “Ettore Majoranaâ€? for Scientific Culture in Erice, Italy from 28 October to 6 November 2005, will enable the world’s scientific communities committed to developing common principles of modern pattern analysis to come together and share their experiences.

A number of lectures and presentations on the theme of pattern analysis and related developments will be given by eminent academics. Among those speaking are: Gregory Chaitin, IBM T J Watson Research Centre, Esko Ukkonen, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Dan Gusfield, University of California, Davis and Alberto Apostolico, University of Padova and Georgia Institute of Technology.

According to Professor John Shawe-Taylor of ECS, together with Professor Nello Cristianini and Professor Raffaele Cerulli one of the three workshop organisers, pattern detection and discovery is at the centre of many disciplines, ranging from classical statistics to modern artificial intelligence, including bioinformatics, web analysis and much more.

He commented: ‘Pattern analysis can be applied to many different fields. For example, we could consider analysing the patterns in the brain which form when people are listening to different musical expressions so that we can see which musical patterns create different effects from pleasure to angst.’

The fact that researchers from different disciplines have been working on pattern analysis for 30 years, has given rise to several separate communities working independently on related topics.

The workshop will provide them with an opportunity to develop a unified conceptual understanding of pattern analysis, recognition and matching, machine learning systems, data mining, statistics and a range of sub-disciplines.

Around 120 graduates of the School attended a reception on Tuesday 22 November at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Savoy Place, The Strand, London. The earliest graduate there was Howard Llewelyn, who graduated from University College Southampton (as it then was) in 1948, but all decades since then were represented, with some graduates flying from India, Switzerland, and Germany. To be added to the School's database of graduates, contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Regenesis is the scientific term that describes the natural renewal that takes place after a forest fire. Appropriately, the term has been chosen to describe the recovery process that has begun in the School of Electronics and Computer Science after the fire that engulfed our Mountbatten Building in October. Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School, was woken in New York to be told of the fire - read her blog of the first week. And add your own words or pictures! Planning has begun for a new modular ECS 'village' to be sited next to Zepler Building and to be ready by late January. The new buildng for Computer Science is on schedule and staff from Zepler will move into it in 2006. The Regenesis project will be launched officially next spring to provide a focus for a range of activities that will accompany the provision of new buildings and facilities for the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The new head of a University of Southampton group which derives its inspiration from nature plans to make it the leading group of its kind in Europe.

Professor Dave Cliff, who joined the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) this month, is to lead the new Science and Engineering of Natural Systems group (SENSe) which will develop ECS research into the science and engineering of computational methods. His aim is to further an understanding of biological and other natural systems, and to undertake research into the development and application of novel computational tools and techniques that are inspired by natural systems.

Professor Cliff spent his early career in academia, initially at the University of Sussex and then MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, and in 1998 moved to industry where he worked most recently as a director in Deutsche Bank's FX Complex Risk Group.

Professor Cliff's early research was in computational neuroscience/neuroethology, studying visual control of gaze and flight in airborne insects and using artificial evolution to automate the design of autonomous robots. In 1996, while working as a consultant for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he invented the seminal 'ZIP' trading algorithm, one of the first of the current generation of autonomous adaptive algorithmic trading systems which began his involvement in working on automating trading processes for the world financial markets.

He is now returning to academia because he believes that this is where the real challenges lie.

He commented: 'Having spent seven years as an academic and then seven as an industrial researcher, I now think that many of the most exciting opportunities lie in academia.'

Through SENSe, Professor Cliff aims to develop ECS's capability so that it becomes the leading group in Europe, if not the world, in naturally-inspired computing techniques. He plans to do this through developing its learning and teaching capabilities and its research collaborations with industry.

He commented: 'ECS at Southampton is the best place in Europe for this kind of work. We are already leaders in our field in terms of our unique combination of skills. It is difficult to think of any other comparable groups anywhere in terms of skills and expertise.'

This month's edition of the prestigious Spectrum journal, published by the IEEE, features an in-depth report on the GLACSWEB project, directed by Dr Kirk Martinez of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, in association with Dr Jane Hart of the University's School of Geography. GLACSWEB is monitoring sediment movement in the Briksdalsbreen Glacier, in Norway, using a series of wireless probes inserted deep into the ice. The research project has been running for five years and has gathered valuable data about the response of the glacier to climate change. Briksdalsbreen is Europe's largest glacier. The article was written by Erico Guizzo, who spent a week with the team during one of their six-monthly visits to the glacier.

Start any institutional repository (IR) with EPrints, recommends Professor Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania (UTas), Australia. In a paper presented to institutions in New Zealand, Sale reports on the widely-used software packages for building IRs, favouring EPrints because of speed of set-up, ease of use, and minimal costs for running and maintaining a server. "It just works. No fuss. No maintenance. It's just too easy", Sale remarked in correspondence.

Although others advocate more complex ICT-based approaches to creating an IR, Sale warns that this will involve more significant manpower costs, and may be unjustifiable. "Can people fly flags and ring bells over conquering Everest when it turns out to be Highgate Hill?"

It is better to get up and running in a week or two, Sale argues, noting that: "All of the OAI-compliant software has the ability to do bulk transfers of the databases, should you wish to change in the future."

Not that such a scenario is likely. EPrints, the original IR software in 2000, has an active and growing developer team, and with its recently launched Services (http://www.eprints.org/services/) and Community (http://www.eprints.org/community/) support is ready to respond quickly to the needs of users.

Sale is not a passive observer of IR developments. Having been responsible for setting up the University of Tasmania's EPrints-based IR, he has written software add-ons, available for download, to provide authors with feedback on the usage of their papers in the IR.

A project which will provide a means of tracing the origins of computer-generated information, has received a seal of approval from industry. Professor Luc Moreau from the School of Electronics & Computer Science and John Ibbotson from IBM UK Ltd have showcased the initial results of the EU Provenance Project to IT analysts with very favourable results. The two-year project, which borrows its name from the trusted, documented history of works of art, aims to extend this concept to the computer science industry.

Richard Veryard, management consultant and technology analyst from CBDI Forum, commented on the fact that current audit trails are “all over the placeâ€? and that provenance is an important aspect of governance and an area which needs an analysis and design methodology.

In an article on IT-Analysis.com, Peter Abrahams from Bloor Research recommends that the Architecture for Provenance Systems which was recently published by the project should be read by anyone developing architectures or solutions for compliance processes.

Professor Moreau commented: ‘Now just 12 months into the EU Provenance Project, we have developed architecture for the project and a methodology guide for its use. Within the next 12 months, we will deliver a standardisation proposal for the industry to use.’

Other partners in the Provenance team are: Cardiff University (Welsh eScience center), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.