An unusual booklet published this month by one of the UK's leading computer scientists aims to highlight the development of agent-based computing and to illustrate the wide reach of this exciting technology in our everyday lives.

Agents are autonomous problem-solving software systems that respond effectively to changing dynamic environments, and agent technologies already impact on our life and work -- from our household appliances and transport systems, to the operations of companies which provide many of our goods and services.

50 Facts about Agent-Based Computing, produced by Professor Michael Luck of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, presents a high-impact snapshot of how agent-based computing has already transformed processes like automated market trading, logistics, and industrial robotics.

‘Agent-based systems are a basic building block of some of the most compelling developments in IT today, and are already having real commercial impact,’ says Professor Luck, Executive Director of the EU-funded AgentLink programme and co-ordinating editor of its Roadmapping activity.

The booklet features companies and organizations which have successfully implemented agent technologies in their operations, including DaimlerChrysler, Whitestein Technologies, IBM, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Many of the 50 Facts demonstrate that agent technologies can outperform human operators, enable companies to make significant cost savings, and to manage complex processes more efficiently.

For example: autonomous market trading agents already outperform human commodity traders by 7 per cent, and DaimlerChrysler experienced a 20 per cent increase in productivity by using agent-based systems to direct individual workpieces in one of its production areas.

AgentLink, an influential project in the EU Information Society Technologies programme, promotes the adoption of agent technologies across the continent, raising awareness, supporting teaching and training, and liaising with industry. The AgentLink III Roadmap is a strategic document intended to guide the direction of agent-based computing over the next decade.

‘Agent-based computing is here to stay and its use is likely to multiply in the future’ says Professor Luck. ‘But the growing complexity of the interactions in emerging distributed systems means that we need to introduce new dynamic techniques to provide more flexible mediation and management. This is our next challenge. Building control into systems is hard enough, but some of the systems being developed now will have properties that we can’t envisage at the moment. And we don’t want to preclude the very great potential benefits of these new systems by introducing traditional controls that are too rigid.’

50 Facts about Agent-Based Computing is now being distributed widely throughout the business and academic research community in order to promote awareness of agent-based technology and to highlight its applications.

‘Agent technologies that are flexible and effective will help us ensure the maximum success and interoperability of the next generation interactive computing environments,’ says Michael Luck. ‘This little book provides an indication of the extent to which we are already reliant on the technology.’

Science Day 2006 Science Day was at our Boldrewood Campus on Saturday 25th March from 10:30 am to 16:30 pm. Young enthusiasts were able to create their own video game that plugs into their television at home. ECS staff and students helped visitors make own computer game, complete with pictures, sounds and play. They were able to make their own version of Pong, Breakout or Tetris and, for a few pounds, program it into the computer chip of a game that they soldered together. The Boldrewood centre is at the junction of The Avenue and Burgess Road. More details are at http://www.creatingthefuture.net/.

The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has launched the first video podcast news service from a UK university.

The School, which carries out world-leading research in multimedia and mobile communications, unveiled the first editions of ECS News this month. The programme is available on the School's web site (www.ecs.soton.ac.uk), and can be downloaded either to be viewed on a portable device (such as an i-Pod video or PSP), or a laptop or desktop screen, or to be listened to as a conventional audio podcast for MP3 players, or i-Pods.

ECS News will provide coverage of research, people, and events in the School. The first editions feature interviews with Professor Michael Luck on agent-based computing, with Professor Neil White on intelligent sensors, and with Dr Les Carr on this May's World Wide Web conference in Edinburgh.

The technology was developed by David Tarrant, Project Manager of ECS TV. 'Video podcasting involves some of the latest video compression streaming techniques,' he said. 'Through using advanced encoding algorithms we can produce a greatly compressed high quality video. The service developed here in ECS is not just being used for news broadcasts. We can take video from any source and enable lecturers and students alike to create a video, either of a lecture, a seminar, or to record an experiment or presentation.

'The great benefit is that this can be downloaded to be watched or listened to at any time and in any place.'

ECS News is presented by Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager for the School. 'Once it was apparent that the technology was available, it seemed obvious to create our own news programme,' she said. 'As a School we have so much happening and so many stories to tell, and ECS News takes us way beyond the conventional newsletter, or even web interview. It's also a wonderfully dynamic feature to have on our web pages, both for our students, who are already using this technology to get news and information from other sources, and for potential students, alumni, the media, and indeed anyone wanting to find out more about what's happening in ECS.

'People can subscribe to the service and the content is then delivered to them automatically. This gives us a great way of keeping in touch and letting people know about new developments in the School,' she added.

Over half of all UK government and local authority websites have errors on their home pages and are problematic for disabled access, a survey in the run up to a major World Wide Web conference reveals.

In advance of WWW2006, which will be held in Edinburgh in May, research carried out by academics at the University of Southampton has revealed that 60 per cent of UK Government websites contain HTML errors. A further 61 per cent do not fully comply with guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (Web Content Accessibility Guide - WCAG), which could prevent some individuals from being able to access them.

WWW2006 has called on webmasters from UK local authority and central government to attend the conference in order to increase their understanding of the latest Web standards and encourage them to adopt them.

According to Adam Field from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) who conducted the survey, a website may look fine and be error-free but this does not mean that it will work with all browsers and for all users and may not always be accessible for visually impaired people. The aim is for websites to function with any browser and any size screen, which can happen if site developers follow the proper guidelines.

The good news for the UK Government is that 25 per cent of all home pages are error-free and fully compliant with WCAG.

'There is a big push within Government to improve web accessibility,' commented Mr Field. 'Although 61 per cent of sites do not comply with WCAG, the 39 per cent which do is encouraging.'

The conference, organized by the University of Southampton in association with the British Computer Society and other international organisations, will bring together key players from the international web community. Some of the events from which webmasters may benefit are:

* Professional Development Tutorial: Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design * Tutorial: Internationalizing XHTML, HTML and CSS Web Content * Web Consortium Standards Briefing: Web Accessibility Guidelines * Workshop: 3rd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility

Speakers at the conference, which is expected to attract up to 2,000 delegates, include key players from the world web technology and communications sectors including Sir Tim Berners Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium; David Brown, chairman of Motorola; Mike Harris, executive vice chairman and founder, Egg PLC; and Gillian Kent, director, MSN.co.uk.

This year’s Computational Electromagnetics conference in Aachen brought together the three main communities in the field and encourage them to look at a multidisciplinary approach.

The Sixth International Conference on Computational Electromagnetics (held in Aachen, Germany from 4-6 April), offered a full programme of speakers from Computational Magnetics, Antennas and Propagation, and Electromagnetic Compatibility.

This conference is the flagship event of the Professional Network Electromagnetics of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) of which Professor Jan Sykulski, Head of Electrical Power Engineering at the University of Southampton’s School of Computer Science (ECS), is the Chairman.

According to Professor Sykulski, who is also on the conference international steering committee (and was previously chair of CEM 2002 and CEM 2004), representatives from the three communities in electromagnetics rarely meet so this conference will provide them with an ideal opportunity to work together.

He commented: ‘The Computational Magnetics community, of which I am part, looks at the modelling and simulation of fields in all sorts of devices from nanotechnology to heavy power engineering, so it spans across the communities. The CEM conference is the only event which brings these communities together in a serious manner.’

CEM 2006 also looked at methods and techniques for predicting the behaviour of various electromagnetic devices so that their design and performance can be optimised.

Professor Sykulski added: ‘Most of these devices, from mobile telephones to big power generators, have many other aspects apart from their electromagnetic components. Therefore, one of our big challenges is to find ways to adopt a multiphysics approach, which would enable us to not just work across communities, but also across disciplines.’

A partnership of UK universities which is working to ensure the UK's international leadership in e-Science has received £5.6 million in funding.

Software development teams at the Universities of Southampton, Edinburgh, and Manchester, are developing advanced tools and components to empower new research in a wide range of disciplines as part of the UK's e-Science Core Programme. Following on from awards to Edinburgh and Manchester in September 2005, Southampton has now received £5.6 million of funding to sustain the collaboration between the partners until 2010.

OMII-UK (the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK) makes Grid software --which is developed by the UK e-Science Programme and its international collaborators -- available and easy to use by e researchers in all disciplines.

Formed in October 2005 by bringing together internationally recognised e-Science expertise at the three institutions, OMII-UK provides a powerful source of well-engineered software and enables an integrated approach to the provision of higher-level and more advanced tools. The new funding enables OMII-UK to commission further development of open source e-Science software components within the community, and extends Southampton’s original funding to support OMII-UK until 2010.

‘The advanced software generated by the e-Science programme ultimately enables new research -- it lets users do things more easily, and enables some things that simply weren’t possible before,’ said Professor David De Roure, who is leading the new phase of the Southampton activity . ‘Our job is to support and sustain that software in partnership with its user community.’

OMII-UK is uniquely placed to offer an integrated set of well-engineered open source Grid middleware that incorporates a wide variety of tools and services. Today, these tools perform tasks such as job submission, data integration and semantically guided workflows using Web Services and Grid infrastructure. OMII-UK will develop more advanced tools to empower new research in a wide range of disciplines.

OMII-UK Operations are the responsibility of Director Dr Steven Newhouse, who commented: ‘We have established a robust software engineering process that integrates software from our collaborators into a distribution that is easy to install, and I am delighted to enter this exciting new phase with its focus on new users and new collaborations.’

OMII UK provides a significant basis for international collaborations and standards. Alongside the UK-centred operation, OMII-China and OMII-Europe are also driving forward the OMII concept on the international stage.

Southampton's globe-trotting 'archivangelist' Professor Stevan Harnad, is currently promoting the benefits of University Open Access Self-Archiving as invited keynote speaker in Europe, the United States and Canada.

'Self-Archiving' means researchers depositing their published articles in their own university's open-access web archives, making them accessible for free, for all users worldwide.

Professor Harnad, one of the founders of the international Open Access movement and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is informing his audiences in five locations around the world that so far only 15 per cent of researchers are self-archiving spontaneously, even though studies from the University of Southampton have shown that self-archiving increases research usage and impact by a dramatic 25-250 per cent in all disciplines. This is especially important for the UK Research Assessment Exercise, he says, given the recently announced proposals that it will in future be based on metrics.

Yet 95 per cent of researchers report that they would comply if self-archiving were mandated by their institution or research funder (just as publishing is mandated) - and the four institutions that have so far mandated it (including Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, the first to do so) have demonstrated sky-rocketing self-archiving rates.

Of scientific journals worldwide, 93 per cent already officially endorse some form of author self-archiving. There is now a simple way that immediate deposit can be mandated even for articles published in the remaining seven per cent of journals that embargo, delay, or disallow author Open Access self-archiving.

This week the University of Southampton added a new 'User email eprint Request' feature to its free open access software, GNU EPrints, to encourage authors who are still hesitant about self-archiving to go ahead and deposit all their articles now, with no delay or embargo, by giving users the extra option of automatically (with just a few extra keystrokes) emailing the author to request an email copy whenever an article has been deposited but not yet made Open Access.

Professor Harnad commented: 'For those (like the RCUK, the European Commission, and the US National Institutes of Health) that have been hesitating about mandating immediate self-archiving because of concerns about the seven per cent of journals with copyright restrictions or delays/embargoes, immediate deposit can now be mandated without mandating immediate Open Access! This will fill the 85 per cent self-archiving gap and tide over the 7 per cent with almost-immediate email access. Research is not funded and conducted to have its usage and impact delayed or embargoed. In fast-moving fields especially, early uptake is critically important for research progress.'

Professor Harnad has presented/is presenting at the following five conferences:

Invited Plenary lecture, 1st European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine (ECSP) "Researchers and Open Access - the new scientific publishing environment" and also Workshop on "Self-archiving, Institutional Repositories, and its impact on research" Lund, Sweden 21- 22 April 2006 http://www.ecspbiomed.net

The Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K) Yale Law School, New Haven, 21-23 April 2006 http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/a2k.html

Invited Keynote. Open Access and Information Management: An International Workshop Organized by the Information Management Committee of Research & Technology Organisation of NATO, Oslo, Norway, May 10, 2006 http://www.rto.nato.int/Detail.asp?ID=1692

Invited Keynote. CRIS2006. Open Access Institutional Repositories. Current Research Information Systems. Bergen, Norway, 11-13 May 2006 http://ct.eurocris.org/CRIS2006/

Congrès de l'ACFAS 2006: Colloque sur l'autoarchivage des articles de recherche, leurs libres accès et leurs impacts scientifiques, McGill, Montréal, 15 mai 2006 http://www.acfas.ca/

An award made this month to the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will help shape the future of e-Science.

ECS has yet again shown its leadership in the area of middleware engineering with the award of a €4.8 million European Union contract to establish the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute for Europe (OMII-Europe). This award follows the recent success of ECS in securing an additional £5.6 million for the national Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute-UK (OMII-UK).

The OMII-Europe award is of particular significance as the University of Southampton is the co-ordinating partner within a 16-partner project involving the major European, American and Chinese institutes involved in Grid middleware development.

‘This project is also regarded within the European Union as a core infrastructure project that will shape the way e-Science is done within Europe for years to come,’ said Professor Peter Henderson, who is leading this activity.

OMII-Europe will provide key software components for building e-Infrastructures within the European Research Area (ERA). The initial focus for OMII-Europe is to facilitate the development and porting of a common set of application level services to a number of major Grid software distributions, and to develop tighter interoperability between those distributions.

Dr Alistair Dunlop, who has been instrumental in forging this collaboration, commented: ‘By bringing together many of the major Grid software providers to harmonize their efforts we will achieve Grid software that is more accessible and easier to use by application scientists.

‘This is a major international initiative that will play a significant part in the overall global effort to take forward the state of the art in Grid technology.’

A grant awarded this month will use e-Science and Grid technology to keep Europe at the forefront of nano-electronics.

The University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) is one of the partners in a £5.3M ($9.1M) project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in collaboration with leading design houses, chip manufacturers and Electronics Computer Aided Design (ECAD) vendors.

The project, which brings together leading semiconductor device, circuit and system experts from academia and industry and e-Scientists with strong grid expertise, will address some of the major challenges facing Nano-CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) design, the discipline which provides silicon chips and transistors which power devices such as computers and mobile phones.

Nano-CMOS design concentrates on the development of ever smaller silicon chips requiring less power and using only one transistor. In order to make the development of such chips a reality, strong links must be established between circuit design, system design and fundamental device technology to allow circuits and systems to accommodate the individual behaviour of every transistor on a chip.

Adjusting for new device architectures and device variability will add significant complexity to the design process, requiring the orchestration of a broad spectrum of design tools by geographically distributed teams of device experts, circuit and system designers.

‘The fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will affect the design of future integrated circuits and systems,’ said ECS Professor Mark Zwolinski. ‘The increasing device variability demands revolutionary changes in the way that future integrated circuits and systems are designed and by working together we can achieve this, but only by embedding e-Science technology and know-how across the whole nano-CMOS electronics design process and revolutionising the way in which these disparate groups currently work.’

The other University partners in this project include Glasgow, Manchester, York and Edinburgh.

The e-Science and Grid technology will be provided by the National e-Science Centre run jointly by Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities and the e-Science North-West Centre at Manchester University.

The industrial partners include ARM and Wolfson Microelectronics (two of the largest UK fabless chip design companies), Synopsys (the world leader in design software) and Freescale, National Semiconductors and Fujtsu (leading semiconductor chip manufacturers). The project also received the support of the National Microelectronics Institute, the Trade Association for UK microelectronics

Teams from ECS carried off two major awards at AAMAS 06, the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, held this month in Hakodate, Japan. In a major coup, the IAM team won the first Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) competition, which was launched with the goal of establishing a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. In the competition, 17 teams of agent researchers from universities around the world pitted their agents against each other, enabling them also to test whether their ideas about trust can feed into a generic problem. The game involved clients requesting appraisals for paintings from different eras; and the success of the appraising agents was judged on the highest number of clients and profit received for producing the most accurate appraisals. The winning appraiser agent (the Southampton agent, IAM), was the one with the highest bank account balance. Previous trust models developed in the School, such as TRAVOS (Luke Teacy and Jigar Patel) and FIRE (Trung Dong Huynh) helped contribute to the Southampton success: ‘We tried to keep our strategy as simple as possible, while making maximum use of the aspects of the game we knew most about,’ said Luke Teacy. The members of the Southampton team were: Professor Nick Jennings,Professor Michael Luck, Trung Dong Huynh, Jigar Patel, Luke Teacy, and Rajdeep Dash. The second Southampton success at the conference was the Darpa Award for Best Applied and Industrial Paper at the conference, which went to the AgentLink team, made up largely of Southampton researchers, for work on industrial case studies of deployed agent systems. The EU-funded AgentLink programme has been led from Southampton for the last five years, promoting agent technologies and their use in business, industry, and public life. Summaries of different applications of agent-based computing, and the lessons that can be learned from them, were described in the winning paper. By providing persuasive examples of deployed systems, the authors aimed to stimulate further industrial applications and to encourage industrially-relevant research. The members of the AgentLink team were: Dr Roxana Belecheanu, Dr Steve Munroe, Professor Michael Luck, Terry Payne (Southampton), Tim Miller, Peter McBurney (Liverpool University), Dr Michal Pechoucek (Czech Technical University).