A new version of the open access software EPrints, being launched today (24th January) in San Antonio, USA, takes its potential to a ‘new dimension’, according to EPrints Technical Director, Dr Leslie Carr.

EPrints is already the world’s leading software for producing open access institutional repositories, which ensure that academic research is accessible and available on the World Wide Web. The new version, EPrints 3, will allow easier, time-saving deposits of academic research, benefiting researchers, librarians and webmasters, and making research more freely available to the public.

‘This brings open access closer to a reality,’ says Dr Carr. ‘EPrints 3 is a complete rewrite of the original software that addresses the key challenge facing repository managers now: how to produce a high value repository with quality assured contents.’

Dr Carr, who is based at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will launch EPrints 3 today (24 January) at the prestigious Open Repositories Conference 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.

'EPrints has already gained the reputation of being a popular and pragmatic solution for producing a repository,' Dr Carr he says. 'Version 3 takes it to another dimension.’

ECS leads the world in open access, Its EPrints software developed in 2000, is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

‘The launch of EPrints 3 is particularly timely,’ says Dr Carr. ‘In the UK the Research Councils (RCUK) have announced that all research council-funded research must in future 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.'

Backed by a support team with expertise in the research, library and publishing industries, EPrints 3 is the basis of a variety of open source, bespoke and hosted repository solutions. It will be available at: http://www.eprints.org

MailScanner, the world’s most widely-used email security and anti-spam system, has just reached its one millionth download.

According to Julian Field, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton who began developing MailScanner in 2000, this is now the best email protection system in the world.

'Reaching the milestone of one million downloads of MailScanner demonstrates the importance and impact of our e-mail research in ECS,' said Julian. 'Using the research resources provided by the School, this software has been developed into a world-leading e-mail protection system with over 60,000 installations around the globe. It is used in over 80 countries and handles mail delivered to all seven continents, including Antarctica.'

Julian also believes that the success of this operation lies in its open source system which guarantees its reliability, and the fact that its spam handling technology is ahead of the competition.

He comments: ‘Our spam-handling features are much more flexible than other systems. Even if our system thinks a message is spam, it can still let it through but can wrap it up in another message so that if it is offensive, it won’t hit you in the face.’

The success of MailScanner can be judged from the fact that it is used in some of the world’s leading organizations, including Vodafone Europe, US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities, and Amnesty International, Friends Of The Earth and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering.

This year's Multimedia Systems Conference provided an excellent showcase for the final-year Computer Science course in Multimedia Systems. The Conference was sponsored by Siemens Roke Manor Research. The conference, the seventh in the series, included 11 papers in four different sessions, a panel session on the future of TV, and around 60 posters were exhibited during session breaks. Students on the Multimedia Systems course have the ambitious task of organizing and running a day-long conference, in which their own research findings are presented to an audience of students and staff. Like a typical academic conference, the MMS event includes individual research project posters, anonymous peer review, and a full day of presentations. The keynote was given by Peter Lockhart, Head of Future Systems at Siemens Roke Manor.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed a solution to ‘shill-bidding’, a disruptive but increasingly prevalent practice which threatens the integrity of online auctions such as eBay.

Shill-bidding occurs when a seller, or a friend or associate of a seller, bids clandestinely on their own sale. Sellers can thus increase the price of their own items or ultimately buy them back if the auction fails to achieve the price they want.

Recent media articles have highlighted the practice and the problems it poses for online auction sites (Sunday Times, 28/1/07 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2570548.html. Not only does it artificially inflate the sale price, causing financial loss to potential buyers, but it also erodes faith in the integrity and fairness of the marketplace. The practice is illegal in many countries and prohibited on most common online auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.

However, shill-bidding is notoriously hard to detect and harder still to substantiate, particularly in online auctions where it is easy for bidders to use false identities.

Now researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science who are at the forefront of auction mechanism research (Dr Enrico Gerding, Dr Alex Rogers, Dr Rajdeep Dash and Professor Nicholas Jennings) have proposed an effective and simple way of combating shilling, which avoids legislation. In a paper presented to the world’s leading conference on artificial intelligence in India this month, they demonstrated through simulation the effectivess of using different kinds of listing and commission fees from those currently in use on eBay.

Shill-bidding is particularly relevant to eBay since, in addition to a percentage of the selling price, eBay also charges a fee if the seller sets a minimum price in the form of a reserve or starting price. However, sellers can avoid this fee by placing a shill bid instead, thereby effectively ‘hiding’ their minimum price. Moreover, according to eBay, ‘sellers have found that setting the starting price too high may discourage bidding.’ As a result, shill-bidding becomes attractive to the seller since it provides a way of setting reserve/starting prices surreptitiously.

The alternative fee structure proposed by the ECS researchers takes a percentage only of the difference between the set minimum price and the final selling price. This fee effectively rewards the setting of a minimum price and has been shown to reduce the incentive for sellers to shill bid, as well as providing higher benefits to the buyers.

A glimpse into the future of pervasive electronics, and a novel method for fabricating electronic sensors, will be presented at the University of Southampton next week.

These significant advances in electronics made in the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will be addressed by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Professor Neil White when they deliver their inaugural lectures on Wednesday 14 February.

A champion in the quest to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in devices such as mobile phones, Professor Al-Hashimi will present a lecture entitled Mobile to Pervasive: A Journey in Electronics Design.

In his talk, Professor Al-Hashimi will discuss the innovative research which has enabled mobile electronics technology to develop to the point where it has become pervasive and, in the near future, could contribute to solving some of society’s large-scale challenges in the fields of energy and healthcare.

Professor Neil White, who has hit the headlines recently for his work on the development of the ‘Southampton Hand’, a new prosthetic hand which not only mimics the motion of a human hand, but also has ‘senses’, will demonstrate how screen printing, one of the oldest forms of graphic reproduction, can be used to fabricate sensors. A wide variety of different devices will be covered and examples given of their use in some unusual scenarios.

Professor White's lecture is entitled 'The Sixth Sense: A study of film sensorship.'

Professor White’s work on developing self-powered sensors has been well documented and work is currently under way to miniaturise such devices to the size of a 5p coin.

Members of the public are welcome to attend this event which will take place in the Lecture Theatre, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University Road, University of Southampton at 3.30pm on Wednesday 14 February. Tea is available in the foyer from 3 pm.

Latest images of the new clean room complex being built for the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre reveal a futuristic design that will create a new landmark for the University.

The new Mountbatten project is now visibly making progress. Just over half the piles have been sunk for the foundations and the pile caps are starting to be cast.

The main design consultants, IDC, with their architects, Jestico+Whiles, have been working hard in developing the design to a point where tender packages can be released. Most of these are now out and decisions are starting on which companies to use for the various parts of the construction.

This new facility which contains a clean room as well as associated offices, labs and teaching spaces, will be a state of the art interdisciplinary research complex, designed to meet long-term needs of the University research groups which will be based there. Completion of the complex is scheduled for mid-2008.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, FRS, inventor of the World Wide Web, will be looking back and forwards at the Web's development, in his inaugural lecture at Southampton, which takes place on 14 March.

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

A graduate of Oxford University, Professor Berners-Lee now holds the 3Com Founders chair at MIT. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential.

With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England, and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England.

Tim Berners-Lee is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) launched in November 2006 to 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 gnerations of researrchers. The other Founding Directors of WSRI are Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner.

Professor Berners Lee's lecture takes place on the Highfield Campus at 5 pm on Wednesday 14 March. Admission is by ticket only; to request a ticket contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk (tel.023 8059 5453).

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed a solution to ‘shill-bidding’, a disruptive but increasingly prevalent practice which threatens the integrity of online auctions such as eBay.

Shill-bidding occurs when a seller, or a friend or associate of a seller, bids clandestinely on their own sale. Sellers can thus increase the price of their own items or ultimately buy them back if the auction fails to achieve the price they want.

Recent media articles have highlighted the practice and the problems it poses for online auction sites (Sunday Times, 28/1/07 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2570548.html. Not only does it artificially inflate the sale price, causing financial loss to potential buyers, but it also erodes faith in the integrity and fairness of the marketplace. The practice is illegal in many countries and prohibited on most common online auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.

However, shill-bidding is notoriously hard to detect and harder still to substantiate, particularly in online auctions where it is easy for bidders to use false identities.

Now researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science who are at the forefront of auction mechanism research (Dr Enrico Gerding, Dr Alex Rogers, Dr Rajdeep Dash and Professor Nicholas Jennings) have proposed an effective and simple way of combating shilling, which avoids legislation. In a paper presented to the world’s leading conference on artificial intelligence in India this month, they demonstrated through simulation the effectivess of using different kinds of listing and commission fees from those currently in use on eBay.

Shill-bidding is particularly relevant to eBay since, in addition to a percentage of the selling price, eBay also charges a fee if the seller sets a minimum price in the form of a reserve or starting price. However, sellers can avoid this fee by placing a shill bid instead, thereby effectively ‘hiding’ their minimum price. Moreover, according to eBay, ‘sellers have found that setting the starting price too high may discourage bidding.’ As a result, shill-bidding becomes attractive to the seller since it provides a way of setting reserve/starting prices surreptitiously.

The alternative fee structure proposed by the ECS researchers takes a percentage only of the difference between the set minimum price and the final selling price. This fee effectively rewards the setting of a minimum price and has been shown to reduce the incentive for sellers to shill bid, as well as providing higher benefits to the buyers.

When Google-Gadget Award-winner Pamela Fox told Grid developers at OGF19 (Open Grid Forum Workshop 19) that she had written some code at 3am on Sunday morning and it had 6000 users by Tuesday, the OGF audience knew they had to pay attention. Add to this the fact that the first time she used a Web API was eight months before.

Fox’s Web 2.0 developers’ tutorial – entitled 'Web 2.0 Mashups: How People Can Tap into the 'Grid' for Fun & Profit' – was one of several invited talks at the workshop on Web 2.0 and the Grid organized at OGF19 by David De Roure.

'In Grid and Web 2.0 we see different approaches to building interoperable systems,' said De Roure, who leads OGF activities on the Web-Grid interface and founded the Semantic Grid activity. 'The workshop was the first crucial opportunity to see what Grid can learn from the successes of Web 2.0, like mashups,' he added.

The keynote speakers at the event at Chapel Hill, North Carolina,were Professor Noshir Contractor from NCSA, a leading world expert in social networks, and Professor Carole Goble of the myGrid project in University of Manchester who presented her vision of myExperiment – a social space for scientists which owes more to Web 2.0 sites like MySpace than to traditional grid portals.

Goble explained: 'myExperiment is about sharing the digital artifacts of the scientific process – like workflows, services and data – so that scientists can build on each other’s work. This accelerates time-to-experiment as well as insight and dissemination, and it enables scientists to be more creative – to be scientists not programmers.' The workshop also featured an update on Semantic Grid activities. Since its inception in 2001, many Semantic Grid projects have successfully completed, and best practice in this combination of Grid and Web technologies is becoming established.'When we wrote the Semantic Grid report in 2001 we presented the technologies we felt were needed to fill the gap between the e-Science aspiration and the Grid reality' said De Roure. 'If we did this exercise today, Web 2.0 would feature significantly.'

The closing discussion at the workshop observed that cyberinfrastructure can be built with both Grid and Web 2.0, and discussed this new manifesto. A second workshop is being planned.

For further information, including the presentations, see www.semanticgrid.org