Registration for the 15th annual World Wide Web Conference 2006 has been opened by the University of Southampton's Professor Wendy Hall. The four-day event, to be held in the UK for the first time, will take place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre between 23 and 26 May 2006. It is expected to attract 1500 to 2000 delegates and will bring together key players from the international community.

'WWW2006 will be the meeting ground for the brightest minds and the broadest thinkers to discuss, debate and set the future direction of the World Wide Web,' said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, the conference organisers. 'Attendance will be vital for anyone wanting to keep ahead of emerging technologies and innovation on the web.' The conference programme will feature papers on world-leading technical innovations in the mobile web; building and using large-scale web infrastructure; web-based software and information engineering; web ethics and the challenges of security and privacy. Invited speakers will explore the implications and applications of web technology for government, society and business through a series of individual presentations, panel discussions and questions from the floor.

'The conference has a growing reputation for its outstanding technical quality,' said Dr Les Carr, one of the WWW2006 co-chairs. 'We have invited speakers who will address the wider issues that adopting web technology causes society, and that means providing high-level sessions for information and media professionals, technology consultants, social commentators and political advisors.'

Day one, Tuesday 23 May, is entitled Business Success and has a strong commercial focus. It will reflect on the impact of web-based innovation on the world of e-commerce and more traditional business models. The New Wave, Wednesday 24 May, investigates the next wave of capability for the web, the semantic and pervasive web, and how these will transform society over the next decade.

On Thursday 25 May the conference tackles the international impact of the web on global issues in science, education and security. The final day of the conference, Friday 26 May, scrutinises Society and the Web and the repercussions of the web on health. Areas of discussion will include web-based support for healthcare professionals, patients' confidentiality, terrorism, democracy, child protection and fraud.

Conference attendees will include a blend of key influencers such as CIOs, IT directors and decision makers from the public and private sector and researchers, technologists and developers from institutions and technology-driven businesses.

The conference registration opens with a limited number of tickets available at reduced rates. The special offer Early Bird Passport allows attendance to every event in the four-day conference calendar and covers all tracks and all public social events. The tickets cost £700 (students £400) and will be sold on a first come, first served basis.

An ambitious five-year research programme is aiming to find solutions for some of the most complex and challenging problems that we currently face.

Disaster recovery, particularly the restoration and maintenance of decentralised data and information systems, has been chosen as the real-world application for the ALADDIN project, which comprises a team of experts led by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

'Typically the response to complex incidents, such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack, involves highly uncertain and dynamic environments,' said Professor Jennings, 'in which information exhibits ambiguity, imprecision, and bias, and is held by multiple stakeholders with different aims and objectives. Resources are often limited, and resource levels can vary.

'Our aim in this programme is to develop techniques, methods and architectures to build decentralised information systems that can operate effectively in these extremely difficult circumstances.'

The £5.5m ALADDIN programme is one of a number of programmes that bring leading academic groups to key industrial challenges through the BAE Systems/EPSRC Strategic Partnership, with the objective of delivering high-quality research and enhancing industrial capabilities.

The ALADDIN team comprises internationally-leading researchers in complex adaptive systems from the Universities of Southampton, Bristol and Imperial College; in fusion, inference and learning from the University of Oxford and Imperial; and in decentralised architectures from BAE Systems.

Professor John Murphy, Head of University Partnerships, BAE Systems, said: 'To have competitive products and capabilities for future global markets we need to initiate the research now, with the best academics. Its success will depend on how well we excel at transferring the knowledge into the company. ALADDIN, directed for BAE Systems by Dr Robert Johnson from our Integrated System Technologies business, has wide relevance across our company.'

The researchers will focus on autonomous reactive and proactive components of information systems-known as 'agents', which can sense, act, and interact in order to achieve individual and collective aims.

'These agents need to be effective in such challenging environments,' said Professor Jennings. 'They need to be able to make best use of the information available, to be flexible and agile in their decision making, cognizant of the fact that there are other agents in the system, and adaptive to their changing environment.'

Amongst the challenges facing the researchers is to bring together work from a number of hitherto distinct fields, such as information fusion, inference, decision-making, and machine-learning. This work then needs to be combined with work from multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design and mathematical modelling of collective behaviour in order to give a collective view on behaviour.

'As ever more information sources become available-through the Web, intranets, and so on-the problem of obtaining and fusing the right information when making decisions and taking actions is becoming increasingly pressing,' said Professor Jennings.

Ironically, Professor Jennings found himself at the centre of a major fire in the School of Electronics and Computer Science in late October. Not only did the fire devastate research facilities in the School, its effects put the School's servers out of action, losing all communication with the outside world through web and email. The restoration of network systems then took five days to achieve. 'The fire has certainly hardened my belief about the importance of the domain and the need to ensure that disparate organisations with their own aims and objectives are well co-ordinated,' he said.

(ALADDIN stands for Autonomous Learning Agents in Decentralized Data and Information Networks)

Computer scientists are developing Virtual Research Environments which should lead to a better understanding of stem cells behaviour.

Dr Gary Wills and Dr Yee-Wai Sim at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton are working on the Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to develop Virtual Research Environments (VRE) for orthopaedic surgeons.

CORE is developing a VRE to aid surgeons and biomedical researchers in conducting clinical trials and preparing findings for publication. The aim is for VRE users to utilise the rapidly expanding computing and storage capabilities of federated computing Grids to run data analyses and simulations, in order to understand how stem cells develop in bone and other skeletal tissues.

Dr Wills commented: ‘No one knows what triggers stem cells to develop bone. By using Grid simulations, we can begin to understand the whole process, from the level of the cells’ own programming right through to the growth and repair of living tissue in patients.’

Simon Grange, an orthopaedic surgeon involved in the work, said that the chance to model the genetic origins of disease with the clinical manifestations will provide new insights into how conditions as varied as growth disorders and osteoporotic fractures covering the full spectrum of ages will be treated in future.

‘We aim to achieve the next quantum leap forward in science benefiting from the knowledge gained from the Human Genome Project,’ he said. ‘This computing resource should open completely new avenues, starting from understanding the disease processes, to finding cost effective treatments.’

The CORE will also involve the development of computer-based models which use the Semantic Web, Grid and Internet to allow clinicians across the UK to share and reuse knowledge to improve health care. It will use new software from OMII (the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute based at the University of Southampton) which will make possible large-scale modelling and simulations processes.

Dr Yee-Wai Sim commented: ‘No one has ever done work like this with orthopaedic surgeons. In fact, computer science has never done anything on such a scale either. We see it as a major breakthrough. The new software will make the whole process much easier for scientists and non-scientists alike to use.’

The project will run until October 2006 and a VRE demonstrator is planned to be available by mid-December this year.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Deputy Director of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a Fellowship by the Optical Society of America (OSA). The OSA is the premier international learned society for scientists working in optics and photonics, and is behind the top academic journals and conferences in this field.

Professor Rutt, who is also Deputy Director of the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, and an Electronics graduate of the University of Southampton, received his Fellowship ‘for pioneering contributions to infrared science and technology including the discovery and development of new optically pumped molecular gas lasers.'

OSA Fellowships 2006 have also been awarded to Professors Anne Tropper and Jeremy Baumberg from the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Professor Andy Clarkson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

'These awards recognise the outstanding achievements of these four new Fellows in their diverse areas in optical research and their potential for future discovery,' commented Professor Joe Hammond, Dean of the University's Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics. 'The fact that these awards cover three University schools demonstrates the collaborative and multidisciplinary approach needed when moving forward in photonics.'

New research in the School of Electronics and Computer Science which could lead to the development of cheaper, more reliable portable devices has just received funding.

The project, which aims to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in devices such as mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and digital cameras, has been awarded £250,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The research is led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi with Professor Mark Zwolinski from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) in conjunction with ARM UK: Architecture for the Digital World, Cambridge.

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, the incompatibilities between the existing techniques for testing the design of low-power embedded computing systems are making the development of such products an expensive process.

He commented: 'Embedded computing systems are often over-designed to allow designers to decrease development time through the reuse of the hardware over several product generations. This means that such systems will experience slack times where a reduced system performance can be tolerated and lower power can be achieved. Our project addresses this issue by developing fault tolerance and testing techniques that are compatible with low power, thus enabling cost-effective design and manufacturing of low-power electronic systems with improved reliability.'

The project, which begins in March 2006 and will run for two years, will address two main themes of research. By the end of the first theme, the researchers plan to have developed fault tolerant techniques that are capable of improving the reliability of low-power systems; by the end of the second, they plan to have developed further fault models and validated them through extensive simulation and an industry case study.

Professor Al-Hashimi concluded: 'This research will benefit industrial companies involved in the design and manufacture of low-power embedded cores, particularly for wireless communications and portable systems. To remain ahead of the field, it is important for companies to continually develop and improve their products, with a drive towards increased reliability and functionality.'

Innos, the UK’s leading research and development company for innovations in nanoscale technology, and the Nanoscale Systems Integration Group (NSI), today revealed how it is possible to accurately pattern silicon wafers using e-beam direct write, with accuracies of a few tens of nanometres. The Supergen consortium EPSRC funded project is the first fabrication process to be completed by Innos, since signing an agreement with Philips to have full access to its MiPlaza facility in Eindhoven, following the Southampton fire on 30 October 2005.

The project has been completed by Innos for Dr Darren Bagnall and his team from the NSI, based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. The project development work for biomimetic optical nanostructures attempts to mimic the nanostructured arrays seen on the cornea of certain night-flying moths.

Dr Bagnall explains: 'By using this type of nanostructure, we hope to create silicon surfaces that do not reflect light which would be very important for applications such as solar cells.'

Sales and Marketing Director at Innos, Alec Reader comments from the Innos head office in Southampton: 'It is testament to the team here at Innos that we have been able to seamlessly transfer activity to the MiPlaza facility and are completing processes so soon after the fire.'

Each year final year students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations, undertake a Software Management Exercise, working in teams to manage a virtual software development project. The teams aim to deliver high-quality items on time and within budget, and the winning team achieves the best compromises on cost, timescale, and quality. This year’s results were the best ever, and the victorious team was ‘Industrial Revolutions’, composed of Sam Thompson, Glen Dunnel, Emmanuel Machobane and Ian Bremner, all Part III MEng Computer Engineers. Andrew Brusby, on the third year of his course in Computer Science with Image and Multimedia Systems, gained a record Quality rating of 92.7 in the exercise. Prizes of booktokens were donated by O’Reilly Publishers. Pictured (l-r): Ian Bremner, Emmanuel Machobane, Andrew Brusby, Paul André, and Paul Catton.

A new MSc course in Web Technology is one of two new courses launched by ECS to run from October 2006. The new Web Technology course covers the current and emerging technologies being used to support web-based software systems. Also launched this year, the new Complexity Science MSc addresses the critical challenges facing the computational and biological sciences, by focusing on the underlying principles of complexity common to both. The MSc in Web Technology provides the opportunity to study markup languages such as HTML and XML, their applications in e-business and web services, and related topics such as security, cryptography, intelligent agents, interaction design, and distributed computing systems, taught by leading experts in these areas. The MSc Complexity Science places emphasis on two complementary objectives. Students on the course will learn how to use advanced techniques to understand the robust, adaptive and self-organising properties of biological and natural systems, and also how to exploit these properties to address the pressing problems presented by the increasing scale and connectivity of today's engineeered systems. Both courses are intensive high-level, research-led programmes that last for one year, and involve a mixture of taught components as well as a 13-week research project and dissertation.

A group of second-year undergraduate students from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, working with sixth-formers at Peter Symonds College, Winchester (PSC), make up one of only three UK teams to be taking part in the high-profile FIRST annual robotics competition, based in the United States.

The team has just begun the six-week build period to design their robot for the Toronto regional competitive event, which will be held on 30 March and 1 April.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) attracts around 1000 entries each year. The competition emphasises engineering, teamwork and collaboration between teams who have only six weeks to design and build their robot for a task that changes each year. This year’s challenge involves large 50kg robots autonomously shooting basketballs through hoops to score points.

The ECS students, Justyn Butler, Robert Spanton, Jeffrey Gough, and Howard Buck, formed the robotics group at PSC last October, and have been mentoring the sixth-formers since then, visiting the College each week. The group is working on a robotics kit for teaching engineering through practical experience.

‘We’re developing a versatile system of modules that stack together,’ said Justyn Butler, ‘so that a broad range of robots can be developed from one set of parts. This system allows new modules to be added easily and we have many ideas for new functionality.’

The system is suitable for people with any level of technical ability, and according to Justyn, a simple robot can be built with no background knowledge, while more adventurous students are free to develop their own ideas.

Not only are the team building their robot kits, and FIRST robot but they are also fundraising hard, with a target of £19000 to meet the cost of the entry fee, materials, tools, and transport for the team to take part in Toronto.

Adrian Pelling, Physics teacher at PSC, is enthusiastic about the project: ‘This is a great opportunity for students to deal with real-life problem solving,’ he said. ‘It’s all about being a good team, and our college students have had to show great resourcefulness and initiative in order to attempt this challenge.’

He is equally enthusiastic about the Southampton students’ involvement: ‘Our student mentors have been fantastic,’ he said. ‘Their technical knowledge and skill is impressive as is their ability to communicate with and motivate the team.’

For the students and sixth-formers the lists of tasks to be accomplished by the competition encompasses not just the design, build, programming and testing of the robots, but also raising sponsorship, organizing events, preparing publicity, meeting with company representatives, shipping the robot to Toronto, booking flights, ordering parts, organizing accommodation … an endless list, that still has to be carried out despite other pressing study commitments.

But as Adrian Pelling notes: ‘Education should be so much more than passing exams. The FIRST challenge develops a wide range of skills in our students that they and their future employers will find invaluable.’