Two first year Computer Science undergraduates, Jason Allen and Stephen Jenkins won the best programming team in an inter-university challenge held in London yesterday. Teams from Southampton, Kent, Leeds and Durham competed in a challenge sponsored by the Higher Education Academy and Sun Microsystems.

Three paired programming teams from each university completed a series of one hour tasks set by their fellow competitors. The competition was devised from academics from the four universities who are working together to develop teaching methods specifically designed to extend our more advanced students. Seven students from Southampton devised one of the challenges which students from Kent, Durham and Leeds attempted. They then worked in paired teams to take on the other universities’ challenges themselves.

Dr Su White of the ECS Learning Societies Lab who led the recruitment and participation of the University of Southampton competitors said 'Every year we have a significant number of very able students who begin their studies with significant previous programming experience. All of the seven students who competed from Southampton are top notch, and we have many more able students who did not compete. Our academic teaching teams continuously refine the ways in which we introduce and develop programming activities during the first year. It's vital that every student has a chance to learn programming at a pace which is appropriate for their prior experience. All of Jason and Stephen’s work was consistently scored high, and we are thrilled that they came out as top team.'

The competition was staged at Central Hall Westminster during a Sun Tech Day. The team challenge prize was won by students from the University of Kent. Team Pair Prizes and Hosting were sponsored by Sun. Planning travel and challenge prizes were sponsored by HEA-ICS, the Higher Education Academy for Information and Computer Science as part of the TOPS project.

Participating academics were Su White, University of Southampton, Janet Carter, University of Kent, Stephan Jamieson, University of Durham, and Nick Efford and Tony Jenkins from the University of Leeds.

'The project was run on a shoestring this year,' said Dr White, 'but has been such a success that the group will be looking for further sponsorship to make this a regular event in the computer science undergraduates’ calendar.'

Researchers in ECS led by Dr Michael Kraft are involved in research that aims to develop new radiation sources suitable for the treatment of cancers and thedetection of hidden explosives.

The £4.5 million Basic Technology research project funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) aims to exploit properties of laser-irradiated matter so that new radiation sources with diverse medical, industrial and security applications can be developed.

The radiation that is emitted is in the form of beams of ions, protons, neutrons, electrons, gamma and x-rays, depending on the energy and duration of the laser and the material being irradiated.

Dr Michael Kraft at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will work on developing a mechanism to inject the targets into the laser chamber at high repeat intervals.

‘We will work on novel injection systems exploiting electrostatic levitation based on advanced MEMS technology,’ he said. ‘This is effectively a ‘MEMS gun’ where small particles are levitated and propelled by using electrostatic forces. This can be used in combination with optical trapping techniques developed by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, one of our consortium partners.’ Of the possible radiation beams that can be produced, the researchers have identified protons, ions, and gamma rays specifically as the products of laser-energised sources with the greatest potential. They envisage a wide range of applications for such ion beams.

For instance, laser-energised bursts of proton and light ions have the potential to substantially reduce the high equipment costs of proton and ion radiotherapy of cancer, which have so far precluded their routine use in the treatment of cancers in the UK. Compared to the use of X-rays, ion beam therapy promises more effective cancer control and improved quality of life in cancer patients.

Other applications lie in science and industry where ions may be useful in engineering diagnostics and quality control of semiconductor electronics devices.

Radiation beams could also have applications in security. A penetrating beam could be used in rapid imaging detection of hidden materials and explosives in large packages and freight containers using gamma-ray tomography to give better resolution and clarity than is currently possible.

The project is being carried out by researchers at the University of Southampton Queen's University Belfast, Central Laser Facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Imperial College London, and the Universities of Surrey, Birmingham, Paisley, and Strathclyde and the National Physical Laboratory

Professor Deborah Estrin of the University of California, Los Angeles, will give the 4th Campbell Lecture on Tuesday 1 May. This year’s lecture is sponsored by WiSET - Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Professor Estrin’s lecture is entitled ‘Wireless Sensing Systems: From ecosystems to human systems’, and will focus on the way that sensing, computation and wireless communications have been combined in integrated, low-power devices, and networks of these devices embedded in the physical world. ‘Looking back over the past few years we have made significant progress towards the vision of programmable, multi-modal, multi-scale, and multi-use observatories,’ she says. ‘We have made our greatest strides in these applications using judicious application of server-side and in situ processing, mobility at multiple scales, and multi-scale data and models as context for in situ measurements.’

Professor Estrin will consider how these lessons and new technologies are now being applied to humans as well as natural systems, in particular by exploring use of the installed base of image and acoustic sensors that we all carry around with us – our mobile phones.

The lecture takes place at 3.30 pm in Bdg 67 lecture theatre, and will be followed by a reception in the level 4 coffee room of Bdg 32.

Tea will be available in Bdg 67 from 3 pm.

Professor Deborah Estrin holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks at UCLA and is Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). She has recently been awarded a 2007 Woman of Vision Award by the Anita Borg Institute.

Tickets are not required for this lecture and all are welcome.

The Campbell Lecture is an annual lecture which showcases successful international women scientists. The lecture is named in honour of Ishbell Campbell (1906-1997) who was one of the founding academics of the University of Southampton, a research chemist who was a committed teacher and inspiration for women in science.

The WiSET group, launched in 2002, has also been involved in a review of the promotion of women, including the funding of an Action Learning Set, a childcare survey and the development of mentoring networks. The Campbell Lecture represents a key part of a visibility project to show the high quality of women scientists both internationally and at Southampton at all stages of their careers.

An energy harvester designed by an ECS professor and manufactured by an ECS spin-out company is powering the world's first low-cost industrial wireless condition monitoring system.

Perpetuum’s energy harvesters power the world’s first low cost industrial wireless condition monitoring system at Prüftechnik’s stand D16, hall 24, at the Hannover Fair. PMG17-100 energy harvesting microgenerator converts machine and plant vibration into useful electricity, enabling wireless sensors to transmit large amounts of critical data. Perpetuum’s microgenerators can be used to power condition monitoring systems enabling end-users to continually monitor plant and equipment allowing them to make significant cost savings.

PMG17-100 operates on vibration from plant or machinery running on mains frequency at 50Hz. It transforms the kinetic energy of vibration into an electrical current, producing ample power, for a wireless transmitter to send 6 Kbytes of data (i.e. a vibration spectrum), every few minutes, or smaller amounts of data several times a second. Installation is easy, efficient and virtually instantaneous: it is simply placed on the piece of equipment without the need for a timely and costly plant shut-down.

Perpetuum’s technology enables wireless sensing nodes to monitor plant, processes and machinery, remotely, wirelessly and without any batteries. It eliminates the need for cables, costly installation and time consuming maintenance.

Perpetuum has been working with partners, including leading European condition monitoring provider, Prüftechnik, and wireless solutions provider, Nanotron, to develop this commercial solution for condition monitoring applications.

“We are delighted to have worked with Prüftechnik and Nanotron to bring this wireless condition monitoring solution to market,â€? says Roy Freeland, CEO Perpetuum. “The result of this collaboration will allow plant operators and managers to improve efficiency through timely and accurate management of plant assets.â€?

The PMG17-100 is the latest offering from Perpetuum, whose other product developments include microgenerators for transportation, medical and aerospace industries.

The original research behind the Perpetuum products was carried out in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, by Professor Neil White and colleagues.

For further information contact: Perpetuum Ltd., Epsilon House, Southampton Science Park, Southampton SO16 7NS. Tel : +44 (0)23 8076 5888. email : info@perpetuum.co.uk

Advances in telecommunications and the issue of whether they are moving fast enough to service the emerging wireless Internet will be addressed by Professor Lajos Hanzo in a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering on Tuesday 1 May.

Professor Hanzo, Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will deliver 'Genetics and Evolution in Wireless Multimedia Communications: A one-to-one with anyone – or the dawn of the “world wide wait"'?

In his lecture, the fifth in a series in Mobile Telecommunications & Networks, supported by VODAFONE, Professor Hanzo, who has established a reputation as one of the world’s leading authorities on adaptive wireless communication systems, will begin with a light-hearted historical perspective on the generations of wireless systems and contrast some of them with the practical constraints imposed on state-of-the-art multimedia communicators.

He will go on to examine the research challenges which will need to be met if the wireless Internet is to become a reality.

He will claim that, in the face of adverse wireless channel conditions, it is unrealistic to expect that any fixed-mode wireless system remains capable of maintaining a constant quality-of-service. This motivates the design of cutting-edge near-instantaneously adaptive wireless transceivers which offer capabilities beyond those of currently operational systems. For example, ‘roaming’ base stations in trains or buses would not only provide better service to users on public transport, but would also provide radio coverage to surrounding cars and pedestrians, in a traffic jam, for example.

‘These advances can be further augmented by quantifying the benefits of sophisticated adaptive antenna arrays, before demonstrating their system-level benefits – for example, their ability to circumvent the threat of the “world-wide waitâ€? in the emerging wireless Internet …,’ he will say.

Professor Wendy Hall has received an honorary degree from the University of Pretoria, recognizing her pioneering work in hypermedia and web technologies, and her leadership in computer science worldwide.

The honorary degree of PhD was awarded to Professor Hall at the University's autumn degree ceremony in April 2007. The citation stated: 'Her pioneering contribution was to customise links, enabling the system to establish relationships between data and to store links as entities in their own right. Now the new field of Web Science will again revolutionise how we think about knowledge and information, drawing inspiration from nature or biology forevolution and growth and encompassing disciplines such as psychology and social and political science.'

The citation noted that Professor Hall's connection with the University of Pretoria dates from the early 1990s when she presented graduate courses in hypermedia as part of the new MSc(IT) degree. She was presented for her degree by Professor Judith Bishop, an alumnus of the University of Southampton, who also taught in the School of Electronics and Computer Science in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The School’s latest recruit is a Lego Mindstorm robot, gifted for student activities by the Institute of Measurement and Control, Wessex section.

The Lego Mindstorm system, which has sophisticated capability and functionality, has been given to the School by the Institute of Measurement and Control (InstMC). It will be used on undergraduate final-year modules in Biorobotics, but it will also help inspire young engineers of the future in local schools.

A group of students in ECS have recently begun a Student Robotics Club with the aim of involving local sixth form schools and colleges in robot-building competitions. ‘This is very much the kind of activity we are aiming to encourage,’ said Cevn Vibert of Silchester Controls, who is an Education Officer for the InstMC. ‘Part of our mission is to interest young people in engineering, and we have a programme of giving these robot kits to universities and colleges in the local region, where we know they will find enthusiastic users. They are not a toy, in fact they are highly customizable, and can do some amazing things.’ The £240 kits comprise a Programmable Robot Block, sensors, motors, PC Software and extensive additional building components.

‘This is an excellent addition to the School’s equipment,’ said Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, ‘and we look forward to seeing the inventive ways that our students will find to use it in the future.’

Pictured: Cevn Vibert (centre left) and Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, with Kisan Visavadia and Richard Ashley-Smith, and in front, Rob Spanton and Stephen English of the Student Robotics Club, and Philip Bennett

A new book which offers practical FPGA solutions to engineers will be published next month.

Design Recipes for FPGAs by Dr Peter Wilson at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), to be published by Newnes Press (an imprint of Elsevier) on the 7 May 2007, provides a toolbox of design techniques and VHDL templates to solve practical, every-day problems using FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays).

An FPGA is a semiconductor device containing programmable logic components and programmable interconnects. They have several advantages over their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) counterparts, in that they have a shorter time to market, ability to reprogram in the field to fix bugs and lower non-recurring engineering costs.

Written in an informal and ‘easy-to-grasp’ style, Dr Wilson’s book goes beyond the principles of FPGAs and hardware description languages to actually demonstrate how specific designs can be synthesized, simulated and downloaded onto an FPGA. In addition, the book provides advanced techniques to create ‘real world’ designs that fit the device required and which are fast and reliable to implement. An accompanying CDROM contains code, test benches and simulation command files for ModelSim.

‘There are lots of textbooks around for engineers,’ said Dr Wilson, but many of them are a bit “abstractâ€?, designed to teach the VHDL language, or too specific. I set out to write something more practical with “real worldâ€? examples and solutions. I was inspired by the renowned “Numerical Recipesâ€? series of books and wanted to do something similar in a design context. In addition, we have designed and built a useful FPGA development board that is compact, easy to use and extensible’

On reviewing the book, Lewin Edwards, Design Engineer and Technical author said: ‘Design Recipes for FPGAs is an excellent volume for engineers who work with FPGAs either regularly or occasionally... the book provides a handy shelf reference with examples for many useful functional blocks, ranging from relatively small illustrative syntactic and structural examples to more complex concepts. Whether you work in VHDL (VHSIC, Hardware, Description, Language) occasionally or every day, you'll find practical help in this book.’

Southampton again leads UK university ratings for electronics and electrical engineering, according to The Guardian University Guide 2008, published today (1 May).

For the second year running Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Southampton has received the top rating from The Guardian, which judges teaching, staff-student ratio, expenditure on student, value added, A level entry points, and importantly, job prospects. The Guardian also considers student satisfaction results from the National Student Survey and, on both of these counts and on teaching, Southampton scores particularly high.

Computer Science comes fifth in the league tables, running close to York and Bangor. Again job prospects for Southampton Computer Science are particularly high.

'These are excellent results', said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'We know that ECS is a great place to study and work, but it's good to see this reflected in external rankings. We're particularly pleased with the excellent job prospects for our students underlined by The Guardian, since this fully endorses the high quality of education which we are able to offer across all our degree courses.'

The University of Southampton comes 13th in The Guardian League Tables.

Rodney Brooks, one of the world's leading researchers in AI, will be lecturing at ECS on Tuesday 15 May.

Professor Rodney Brooks is Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.

In his lecture to the School of Electronics and Computer Science, he will be addressing the four key research challenges that must be met if robots are to become truly useful. These involve understanding their surroundings, being able to physically act on objects in the home, to communicate with the occupants in an easy and natural way, and to understand some subtleties of human interactions.

In the United States there are currently over 2 million floor-cleaning robots in US homes and demographics will increase the demand for home-robots and new applications.

Professor Brooks will look at how AI is responding to this need.

The lecture takes place at 5 pm on Tuesday 15 May, in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre, University Road, Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome.

This lecture is a 60th anniversary event for the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis (j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk).