Students at ECS have given their courses the highest rating in the country for the quality of their education and teaching. The results of the 2006 National Student Survey show that students in the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science gave the highest ratings in the UK to their courses in Computer Science (average 4.5 out of a possible 5), scoring aspects such as teaching, assessment and feedback, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources, personal development, and overall satisfaction. In Electronic and Electrical Engineering the Southampton students' ratings made ECS joint top along with the University of Kent. The Survey is carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and only final-year students are eligible to take part. Of the 105 eligible students taking Computer Science courses in ECS, 75 returned ratings to the Survey; and out of the 90 students eligible to return surveys in Electronic/Electrical Engineering, 65 did so. The full results of the official Survey do not provide aggregated data, however, The Guardian has published a listing of the best results across the country, which confirms the Southampton top rating for all the courses at ECS (aggregated across both 2005 and 2006 results). What makes our teaching special? To find out more, see details of all our 25 undergraduate degree programmes in our new Undergraduate Prospectus (pdf).

A partnership which will help ensure the UK's international leadership in e-Science has been launched at the country’s premiere e-Science event. The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMII-UK) provides software and support on which the UK e-Science community and its international collaborators will be able to build a sustained future. Teams at the Universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester are putting their expertise to work with the e-Science community in order to provide advanced tools and components which will empower new research in a wide range of disciplines. This activity is a key feature of the UK's e-Science Programme, which held its annual All Hands Meeting in Nottingham last week. OMII-UK Director Dr Steven Newhouse commented: ‘OMII-UK is very much focused on the user – researchers, developers and providers – and the great thing about launching at the major UK e-Science event was that we were able to gain further insight into everyone’s projects and requirements.’ Dr Newhouse emphasised that OMII-UK provides software, support and sustainability. The OMII-UK web site provides a catalogue with information about software for e-Science, a repository for contributing and downloading software, an easy-to-install software release that provides a proven collection of software components for configurable installation, and documentation, tutorials and training. Professor Carole Goble, Chair of OMII-UK, added: ‘It is crucial that the wealth of software and know-how generated by the UK e-Science programme and our innovative Scientists is captured and made available to all. OMII-UK is the key means of doing this.’ OMII-UK gives confidence to the user community in adopting e-Science solutions through software support and training, and provides collaborative mechanisms to enable the e-Science community to help itself. It is also engaged with the international community to define, contribute and disseminate best practice and standards. This is being achieved through the engagement of OMII-UK staff in the Open Grid Forum (OGF), GIN (Grid Interoperability Now), EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science), OMII-Europe and other community activities.

Photo: (l-r)Dr Anne Trefethen,Chair of OMII-UK Board, Professor Malcolm Atkinson, e-Science Envoy and OMII-UK Edinburgh, Professor David De Roure, OMII-UK Southampton, Professor Carole Goble, OMII-UK Manchester and OMII-UK Chair, Dr Steven Newhouse, Director OMII-UK Photo credit: Tim Parkinson

Models of virtual organisations that operate within reliable and trustworthy parameters are being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.

A virtual organisation is one whose members are geographically apart (usually working via networked computer applications) while appearing to others to be a single, unified organisation with a real physical location.

According to Professor Michael Luck of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), as the market for virtual organisations grows and an increasing number of companies are represented by computerised agents acting on their behalf, there is a greater need to ensure that these agents behave responsibly.

In a project which aims to monitor the performance of the members of a virtual organization in terms of their trustworthiness, quality of service and contract compliance, Professor Luck and his team at Southampton have worked with Cardiff University, the University of Aberdeen and British Telecom on CONOISE-G (Grid-enabled Constraint-Oriented Negotiation in an Open Information Services Environment).

‘Creating and then effectively managing a virtual organisation in a dynamic environment poses significant research challenges,’ commented Professor Luck. ‘We need to draw inspiration and examples from human societies and apply them to computerised societies. Selecting different suppliers on the basis of reputation, using information from others to decide who to trust, and discounting information from unreliable sources in making judgements are all actions that need to take place in the interactions of computerized societies as much as in our normal daily lives.’

In seeking to address some of these challenges, the researchers have developed a system for the dynamic formation and operation of virtual organizations, drawing on scenarios such as that of an individual visiting London for the 2012 Olympic Games who requires a PDA to access various multimedia services.

They are currently in the process of implementing a prototype system which looks at issues such as trust and reputation, standardising communication between agents, and policing within a virtual organization, so that the impact of behaviour such as non-delivery of services by an agent is minimised.

Professor Luck commented: ‘The trustworthiness and reputation of agents are significant issues, especially in the context of virtual organizations in which the agents must rely on each other to ensure coherent and effective behaviour.

‘Only limited work has been carried out in this area so far, with the majority of developers adopting the stance of complete trust. This, however, avoids the complex issues which are crucial for the reliability and dependability of these systems and which our research aims to address directly.’

CONOISE-G is due to be completed this month.

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and one of the leading figures in UK engineering and technology, will receive the 2006 Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership at a ceremony in San Diego, California, on Thursday 5 October.

The award, which was established in 2004 in memory of the late Dr Anita Borg, honours outstanding leaders who embrace Borg’s vision to change the world for women and technology. It will be presented at the Grace Hopper Conference and Professor Hall is the first UK recipient.

Professor Hall is an acknowledged leader in intelligent information systems. Her research team developed the well-known Microcosm open hypermedia system, which was patented and spun off into a commercial company. Recently, she has joined with the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and colleagues at Southampton to develop a new research initiative in the emerging field of Web Science.

‘I am truly thrilled to be the recipient of the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership this year,’ she said. ‘It is a tremendous honour and one I shall always be proud of.’

Professor Hall is currently Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Vice-President of the US Association for Computing Machinery. She is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology and of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. She was only the second woman President of the British Computer Society (in 2003-4), and earlier this year, as Executive Chair, she successfully brought the annual World Wide Web conference to the UK for the first time. In March 2006 she was named one of six outstanding women in UK science by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. She was awarded a CBE in 2000 and made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the same year.

From early in her career, she has been committed to attracting more women into computer science and while her efforts and roles have given her influence at the highest levels, she says there is still a long way to go to ensure that science and technology do not lose the powerful insights and skills that women can bring.

‘There is no quick fix,’ she comments. ‘Being a good role model and mentor is not enough. We need big initiatives that are sustainable over a long period of time.

‘We need to excite young people today, particularly girls, by inspiring them with visions of the wonderful careers they could have in the computing and IT industries when they graduate from university in 10 or 12 years from now. Our industry will be very different then – radically different from how it is today.

‘If I can make a difference by encouraging more women to realize this then I will feel I have achieved something really important.’

A new research project aims to produce higher performance inertial sensors which could detect potential car accidents more accurately than any currently available.

Dr Michael Kraft and his team at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are working with a Belgian company, Melexis, to develop innovative control and interface systems to improve the performance of existing micromachined sensors.

In this three-year research project, Melexis, a growing Belgium-based company, which produces integrated semiconductor device systems for use in the automotive market, has supplied micromachined accelerometers (devices for measuring acceleration) so that the team can assess and improve their performance using their interface and control circuits

‘There is a huge, just recently emerging demand for higher performance inertial sensors for intelligent automotive systems and many others,’ commented Dr Kraft. ‘Six to eight airbags are standard already; they need to be deployed by accelerometers that accurately sense the impact of a crash.’

According to Dr Kraft existing commercial accelerometers may not meet these increasing performance specifications. His research programme will take the Melexis accelerometer and use advanced electronics and control engineering to make it better, more versatile and easier to integrate at a system level.

‘This research suggests a radically different approach to improve the performance of these sensors, namely to work on the electronic interface and control systems aspects of these sensors, rather than the microfabricated sensing elements themselves,’ said Dr Kraft.

The prime beneficiaries of this research will be companies supplying sensors for automotive safety systems. Other applications such as for GPS (Global Positioning System) back-up systems, virtual reality systems, inertial navigation and guidance, and seismology, also require sensors with very high specification characteristics.

‘Little research has been done in this field, yet there is huge potential to make a real impact,’ said Dr Kraft. ‘With this approach it should be possible to develop a very versatile interface chip that can be used with a range of micromachined sensors.’

This month, researchers from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will show how some of the latest developments in multimedia knowledge technologies can benefit cultural heritage and creative industries.

Dr Kirk Martinez from ECS and Dr Matthew Addis from ECS’ IT Innovation Centre will be present at this year’s Museum Association Conference at Bournemouth International Centre from 23-25 October to demonstrate how their software provides exciting new ways for museums and galleries to make their multimedia collections more accessible.

Dr Addis commented: ‘Our cultural institutions are fantastic sources of multimedia content. Yet users are often confronted by a myriad of resources to use, and have to guess what search terms to use, trawl through endless lists of hits, and cross their fingers that they haven’t missed the very thing they were looking for. We’re tackling the challenge of how to combine and make available multimedia resources in a way that fits with how people want to use them in education, publishing, public access and scholarly research.’

ECS will show how a whole host of advanced technologies including semantic web, content-based analysis, and cutting-edge user interface design can be used to find, navigate, create and use multimedia content.

Dr Martinez said ‘Most people are familiar with Google-style searching where we use a keyword to two to describe what we want. But what happens if what we want hasn’t been labelled that way, or if you don’t know what you are looking for? Being able to say ‘find me things which look like this’ provides a creative way to explore large art collections. Content-based retrieval involves the application of content-analysis techniques to collections of images, video and, more recently, 3D models, to support this new way of searching.’

ECS will also demonstrate eCHASE, a project funded by the European Commission which is investigating business models for public-private partnerships between cultural heritage content holders (museums, libraries, archives) and content users in education and publishing. Partners include two photo libraries (Fratelli Alinari and Getty Images), a publisher (Instituto Geografico D’Agostini) and a television broadcaster (ORF) who are providing and using content according to various interpretations of a theme entitled ‘wandering borders in Eastern Europe’.

ECS is developing the software platform for eCHASE which allows multimedia content from a wide range of organisations to be semantically integrated and easily used by professionals in education and publishing. eCHASE provides an excellent set of multimedia and multilingual content with which to explore how multimedia knowledge technologies can be used to search, navigate, link, theme and annotate content for use in a wide range of editorial products.

New Technologies for Cultural Heritage and the Creative Industries brochure

An innovative new system from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Ordnance Survey makes paper maps more flexible by combining the traditional map with the vast resources of the Web. Map Snapper allows individuals to take a photograph of a section of a map with a camera phone. This verifies the location and returns an electronic image with points of interest added which the user can investigate further by clicking on them.

Dr Jonathan Hare and Professor Paul Lewis at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) worked with Layla Gordon and Glen Hart from Ordnance Survey’s Research Labs to develop Map Snapper.

‘For example, if I am out in the country heading for Salisbury, the electronic map could give me the location of hotels for me to click on to find out more and could also tell me if there are any festivals or exhibitions going on there,’ Professor Lewis commented.

The team used image matching technology to retrieve the electronic images and make them available digitally. The technology now exists for digital images of this type to become a reality and the initiative could provide commercial opportunities for companies who want to advertise their features.

‘Map Snapper clearly demonstrates the power of new digital content, and yet puts it into the hands of the traditional paper map user’, said David Overton, Exploitation Manager at Ordnance Survey. ‘As an organisation deeply involved in both, we find this project very inspiring.’

Exactly a year to the day after fire destroyed the Mountbatten Building and clean room, demolition teams have moved on to the site to prepare for the construction of the new building. The new state-of-the-art facility is being designed and constructed with the needs of future generations of researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and Optoelectronics Research Centre at the forefront. The new facility will be interdisciplinary and provide flexible research space for fabrication and characterization of materials. Although based on Silicon fabrication technology and largely using Silicon substrates, the new building will enable researchers to concentrate primarily on structuring and modifying materials at the nanoscale. These materials will include Silicon, but will also enable polymers and more exotic materials such as Zinc Oxide, high-refractive index metallic oxides, and lithium niobate, to be nanostructured. The work will create a new generation of unique nanodevices and applications to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of society. The new building will include research laboratories and offices, and will be fully linked at all levels to the existing Zepler Building. Construction of the new building is scheduled to be completed by early 2008.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS takes up office today (Wednesday 1 November) as President of the British Computer Society, with an agenda of public engagement for his year at the helm of the organization.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in ECS and Director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Centre. He is one of four founding Directors of the new Web Science Research Initiative, a joint collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton to establish a new scientific discipline that will research the factors that have made the Web so successful and enable it to develop in the future in a way that we better understand.

Writing in the BCS Yearbook, Professor Shadbolt states his determination to engage and inspire the public on the subject of IT and computing. He points to the poor public image of the subject, particularly in the context of high-profile IT failures: ‘This failure of public engagement is potentially catastrophic for any IT-centric knowledge-based economy,’ he says.

‘We build systems that operate at staggering levels of scale and complexity. They use technologies that a few years ago existed only as laboratory prototypes. They use software systems that represent tens of thousands of person years of human ingenuity and endeavour. There is so much here to convey because it is always a human story of personal and collective triumphs and tragedies, insight and genius, heroic achievements and failures.’

Outlining a number of urgent requirements on which to base new initiatives with schools, the public, the media, business and the public sector, Professor Shadbolt looks forward to a year of evangelizing the concept of computational thinking—‘IT for all’, he says, adding: ‘This is a fitting challenge for our Society in its 50th year.’

The University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced the launch of a long-term research collaboration that aims to produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to guide the future design and use of the World Wide Web.

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the Web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the Web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions as, how do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How will we preserve the Web over time?

Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, “As the Web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.

“The Web Science Research Initiative will allow researchers to take the Web seriously as an object of scientific inquiry, with the goal of helping to foster the Web’s growth and fulfill its great potential as a powerful tool for humanity.â€?

The joint MIT-Southampton initiative will provide a global forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and complexity, and to develop a new discipline of Web science for future generations of researchers.

Professor Wendy Hall, head of school at Southampton University School of Electronics and Computer Science and also, with Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS a founding director of WSRI, said: “As the Web continues to evolve, it is becoming increasingly clear that a new type of graduate will be required to meet the needs of science and industry. Already we are seeing evidence of this, with major Internet companies and research institutions lamenting the fact that there are simply not enough people with the right mix of skills to meet current and future employment demands. In launching WSRI, one of our ultimate aims is to address this issue.â€?

WSRI will be headquartered at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT and at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Initial plans call for joint research projects, workshops and student/faculty exchanges between the two institutions.

The initiative will have four founding directors: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, senior research scientist at MIT and professor at the University of Southampton; Wendy Hall, professor of computer science and head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton; Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton and director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration; and Daniel J. Weitzner, Technology and Society Domain leader of the World Wide Web Consortium and principal research scientist at MIT.