An initiative being launched next week aims to engage the creativity and enthusiasm of young academic researchers to ensure that Europe reaches its full research potential.

The European Research Council (ERC), which will be launched at a conference at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on 27 and 28 February, is the first pan-European funding agency for frontier research across Europe, including science and technology, social sciences and the humanities.

The launch conference, which will address the theme of Excellence in Research through Competition, will be opened by the German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel. It is expected to attract approximately 300 high-ranking researchers and marks an historic moment in European research policy, as well as opening up new opportunities for the most talented and imaginative researchers worldwide.

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, is one of only two UK representatives on the Scientific Council of the ERC and will sit on the opening panel on 27 February.

She commented: ‘It has been a tremendous privilege to be a founding member of the Scientific Council of the ERC. The Council is determined to fund the best research independent of subject discipline, geographical, or political boundaries. By focussing our first call on young researchers we hope to attract the brightest and the best of research talent to Europe.’

The conference will also provide a forum for members of the ERC Scientific Council to communicate the Council’s strategic intentions and to discuss future directions with the European and international scientific community.

Three new courses have been added to the School of Electronics and Computer Science's MSc programme: System-on-Chip, Micro Systems Technology and Nanoelectronics. Full details are in the new MSc Programme Prospectus, published this week. The new prospectus (pdf) contains full details of all the syllabus for all the courses, including the MSc in Complexity Science and in Web Technology, both of which were introduced this year. 'A particularly important aspect of our MSc degrees is that they are offered in subjects for which there is great demand from industry,' writes Dr Darren Bagnall, MSc Programme Director, in his foreword. 'These are also subjects in which ECS is at the forefront, and you will therefore be taught by academics who are world-leaders in their fields.'

A new cross-language research project could reduce language barriers across Europe.

The Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation (SMART) project funded by the European Union (EU) and led by Xerox’s European Research Centre in France, was prompted by the fact that research by the EU suggested that more than half of Europeans can only hold a conversation in their own language, and that existing document translation services do not always produce accurate results that scan grammatically very well.

'There have been lots of applications of machine learning techniques to machine translation in the past,' said Dr Craig Saunders, project partner at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS). ‘The project aims to extend the more traditional methods based on log linear models, and also apply recent developments in machine learning for structured prediction which have led to many new powerful techniques that show great potential in this area.’

Over a three-year period, SMART plans to apply modern machine learning techniques through English, French, Spanish and Slovenian to three user scenarios.

A first user scenario will focus on the work of professional translators and aims to assess the potential impact of new technologies on their productivity.

The second scenario considers the work of technicians providing support to customers over the 'phone, holding a conversation in a language different to the technical documentation available.

The third user scenario aims to enable users to access portions of the multilingual Wikipedia in languages of which they have limited command.

'This is the first time that new machine learning techniques are being used in this way,' said Dr Saunders. 'Xerox works across lots of different languages and cross-language information access could be very useful in this context; the possibility of posing a query in one language and getting documents back in another is useful in a wide variety of applications.’

Project partners on SMART are: University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, Amebis d.o.o., Celer Soluciones S.L., Jozef Stefan Institute, National Research Council Canada, University of Bristol, University of Helsinki, Università degli Studi di Milano and University College London.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Professor of Computer Science in ECS, is today (1 March) testifying on the future of the Web before the committee of the US House of Representatives that has jurisdiction over the Internet.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said today that although the evolution of the Web has been gratifying, it is by no means finished:

'The Web, and everything which happens on it, rest on two things: technological protocols, and social conventions,' he said. 'The technological protocols, like HTTP and HTML, determine how computers interact. Social conventions, such as the incentive to make links to valuable resources, or the rules of engagement in a social networking web site, are about how people like to, and are allowed to, interact.

'As the Web passes through its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about these complex technical and social mechanisms. We have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society. Robust technical design, innovative business decisions, and sound public policy judgment all require that we are aware of the complex interactions between technology and society. We call this awareness Web Science: the science and engineering of this massive system for the common good.

In order to galvanize Web Science research and education efforts, MIT and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have created the Web Science Research Initiative. In concert with an international Scientific Advisory Council of distinguished computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars, WSRI will help create an intellectual foundations, educational atmosphere, and resource base to allow researchers to take the Web seriously as an object of scientific enquiry and engineering innovation.'

The Founding Directors of WSRI, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, are: Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton, and Daniel J. Weitzner of MIT.

A Platform Grant (PG) awarded this month could have a major impact on the UK's system and chip design capabilities.

The grant for just over one million pounds sterling has been awarded to the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

It is a renewal of a recent Platform Grant which enabled ECS researchers to develop algorithms and tools for digital synthesis, to design low-power systems and to expand their research activities in analogue and mixed signal design.

'The renewal of this grant for a further four years is recognition of the fact that we are UK leaders in this field,' said Dr Peter Wilson of the Electronic Systems Design group, one of the key investigators on the project. 'The award of any Platform Grant is special, and to have it renewed is really something.'

Dr Wilson and the team of ECS investigators, led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, will continue to undertake highly challenging projects in system-level design methods and mixed-signal design, which they will validate through demonstrator projects.

Two of their key challenges are to push analogue mixed signal design into very small chips and to design nanoelectronics systems with particular emphasis on modelling, simulation and defect-tolerant logic circuit design.

'With the scaling limit of conventional CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) in sight, the PG renewal will enable us to develop new strategic directions by pump-priming adventurous research projects in nanoelectronics design,' said Dr Wilson.

‘The new Pervasive Systems Centre being launched in ECS next week will provide an excellent base for research undertaken within this PG,’ added Professor Al-Hashimi.

A large team of ECS students, ran a very successful electronics and computing activity area at the University's Science Family Day on Saturday 10 March.

Hundreds of visitors took part in the activities provided by ECS for Science Family Day, experiencing virtual reality, building electronic devices such as lie detectors and electronic bagpipes, and making their own computer and video games.

The ECS stand attracted a huge crowd of visitors all day long, and ECS frisbees were among the most popular give-aways of the day!

Dr Steve Gunn and Dr Denis Nicole were also on hand to assist the electronics engineers of the future.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee's inaugural lecture at ECS on Wednesday 14 March will be webcast live to the world at 5 pm GMT. The lecture will be webcast by ECS-TV, and further details are on the ECS-TV web site. The lecture is entitled 'The World Wide Web: Looking back, looking forward'. Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Research Scientist and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative,launched in November 2006. This provides 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. Admission to the lecture is by ticket only. For further information contact Joyce Lewis (tel.023 8059 5453); email j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk. The lecture will be available afterwards as a video podcast.

Innovative sensor technologies which will enable major advances in the understanding of marine ecosystems are being developed by researchers at the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Professor Hywel Morgan (School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS)) and Dr Matt Mowlem (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS)) and colleagues from across the University have received a grant of £1.75M from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to continue their work in developing sensors to measure marine environments.

They are to develop Laboratory on a Chip (LOAC) Technology and fabricate a new generation of integrated micro-devices and sensors capable of operating in harsh environments, without bulky, expensive and power hungry support systems.

According to Professor Morgan, marine environmental sensing has reached a bottle-neck where further advances in knowledge and understanding of ecosystems can only be obtained if a new generation of sensors is brought into being.

The proposal has two strands: to develop lab-on-a-chip chemical and biochemical analyser to detect nutrients and pollutants at the ultra low concentrations found in the ocean, and to develop small chips to identify individual phytoplankton in the oceans. The sensing packages will be deployed by strapping them to vehicles including profiling (ARGO) floats that already give detailed information on the temperature and salinity of the oceans.

The development of these biogeochemical sensors over the next four years will provide a new technology platform for marine scientists and have applications for many allied activities such as those undertaken by the water industry, in environmental impact assessments and in monitoring ship ballast water.

‘We believe that the co-ordinated development of microfabricated devices across this broad front in marine sensing will be a world first,’ said Professor Morgan.

A grant awarded this month could develop atom chip devices which could bring quantum computing closer to a reality.

Dr Michael Kraft at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) and Professor Edward Hinds at Imperial College, London, have been awarded a £1.2 million Basic Technology Translation Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop atom chip devices.

Their task is to take the toolbox of basic atom chip building blocks which they have developed over the past four years and integrate them on a single chip so that they can be developed into systems robust enough to perform useful functions.

The researchers have found that atom chips have potential uses in a variety of futuristic technologies. For example: sensors with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity; quantum computing, which harnesses physical phenomenon unique to quantum mechanics to realise a new mode of information processing, and atom interferometers, instruments that exploit the wave characters of atoms.

Specific atom chip devices to be explored in this new research include atomic clocks, accelerometers, interferometers, magnetometers, single photon sources, quantum information processors and molecule traps.

‘Over the past four years, we have done the fundamental research into atom chips,’ said Dr Kraft. ‘Now it’s time to make application-orientated devices.’

According to Dr Kraft, although other international research groups have worked on atom chips, there are not yet any atom chip devices. He believes that this is a development which will be of benefit to industry and the wider community in the longer term.

‘There is a growing need for unprecedented accuracy in accelerometers and gyroscopes,’ he said. ‘Quantum information processors are potentially leading to quantum computers and atom chip devices will facilitate this process.’

The research which begins this month for a four-year period is a natural sequel to the Basic Technology Atom Chips project, on which Dr Kraft and Professor Hinds worked for the past four years, and it is the necessary step to allow the new basic technology to make contact with the commercial world.

Pervasive computing technology which can monitor the welfare of the elderly will be made available within the next 18 months.

The technology is to be developed by the University of Southampton's new Pervasive Systems Centre which is being launched this month.

The Centre, co-directed by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Professor David De Roure, both from the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) brings together multidisciplinary expertise from across the school's research groups, ranging from sensors and wireless communications to computer science theory and practice.

This combined expertise will make it possible for them to develop a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) which can operate in homes to monitor the health of the elderly.

According to Stephen Spikings, a PhD student under the supervision of Professors De Roure and Al-Hashimi, statistics show that due to the 1960s baby boom, by 2031 almost a quarter of the population will be over state pension age.

In order to make it possible for such individuals to live independently, the researchers are developing low-cost sensor networks to monitor their environment so that changes in health can be detected.

For example a weight sensor positioned under the bed could detect the individual's movements throughout the night. A sensor in the bathroom could monitor use of toilet facilities to pick up signs of digestive problems, and body imaging and temperature sensors could highlight areas of the body that are painful.

'If we image the body and then attach temperature sensors, say, to a chair, the parts of the body that are in pain will radiate infra-red and will be picked up by the sensor,' said Professor De Roure.

The new Pervasive Systems Centre will also use pervasive computing technology to implement a demonstration WSN to monitor people and activity in the new Mountbatten Clean room. A prototype will be available within 12 months.

'It isn't just our broad range of key skills that make the Pervasive Systems Centre unique, but having them in one place enables the collaborative working and codesign that is essential in tackling the engineering and operation of future computerised systems through their entire design lifecycle,' said Professor De Roure. 'Our methodology involves designing and building real systems and deploying them "in the wild", not just in the lab.'