Dr Alun Vaughan at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) has been made a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IoP) in recognition of his contributions to the field of dielectrics.

A dielectric material is a substance that is a poor conductor of electricity, but an efficient supporter of electrostatic fields. Dielectric materials are a vital element of all electronic and electrical equipment.

Dr Vaughan has carried out extensive research into the electrical properties of polymers and dielectric breakdown, understanding the processes of stress and ageing. His group at ECS has an international reputation and their work in dielectrics is virtually unique in the UK.

‘There are lots of other people doing things directly related to plant but in terms of the fundamental physics of high voltage dielectric materials, there aren’t many key players in the UK. If you go to the big international conferences, you find that what we do is of a very high standard and will compare with anything around the world.’

Dr Vaughan has now moved on to look at the field of nanodielectrics, which will be a key theme of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Solid Dielectrics on 8-13 July, which is being organised by ECS.

Dr Vaughan’s external activities include: Honorary Treasury of the Dielectrics Group of the Institute of Physics, a member of both the Executive and Council of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Power Academy, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) College member and Director of Southampton Dielectric Consultants Ltd and of ECS Partners Limited.

Commenting on his appointment as a Fellow of the IoP, he said: ‘I have been involved with the IoP for many years, both on the Dielectrics Committee for five years and as Honorary Treasurer. It is an honour now to be recognised as a Fellow of the Institute.’

For further information contact:

Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (tel. 023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

Professor Ted Nelson, Visiting Professor in ECS, and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will be giving a lecture on Thursday 17 May to celebrate his 70th birthday.

'Intertwingularity: When Ideas Collide' will look at some of the ideas that have delighted and preoccupied him throughout his career. There is bound to be enlightenment, entertainment, and plenty of surprises in his talk.

The lecture takes place at 5 pm in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre on University Road, Highfield. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.

All are welcome, and no tickets are required. For further information contact Joyce Lewis (jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk).

A new type of biochip encapsulating a slime mould cell has been developed by graduate student Ferran Revilla working with Hywel Morgan and Klaus-Peter Zauner in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

The chip provides a controlled environment to keep a plasmodial cell of the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum alive for several days. One side of the biochip is formed by a microfluidic system which is separated from the slime mold by a membrane through which water and nutrients can be fed to the mold. On the other side of the chip the slime mold is surrounded by 38 electrodes which connect the cell to an analog circuit which monitors the activity of the slime mold cell. The chip is transparent, a feature which allows, in addition to the electrical interfacing, also for optical interfacing with the cell.

Undergraduate student Paul Macey designed and built an electronic interface through which the living slime mold cell can be connected to a USB port on a computer. The interface monitors local mechanical oscillations in the cell by measuring the impedance between combinations of electrodes on the biochip. The USB interface also provides for stimulating the slime mold with light signals.

Because of the large size of its cells and the ease which with it can be grown the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood. The new chip will provide a way of interacting with the slime mold through a computer and is expected to contribute to the understanding of the slime mold's response to stimuli.

This ongoing collaboration between the Bioelectronics Group and the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group explores how microorganisms can be integrated into electronic circuits to create sensors and information processors with components that are alive.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, ECS (tel.023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

OMII-Europe attracted large crowds to their booth and presentation in Manchester, UK. Project participants attending the event were constantly answering questions and demonstrating the software. Many people, both from e-science and commerce, were interested in finding out more about the OMII-Europe project and the possibility for future collaboration.

OMII-Europe (the open Middleware Infrastructrue Institute for Europe) is an EU project that is building interoperable software components to overcome the difficulties brought about by heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms. The middleware platforms that OMII-Europe is focusing on are gLite, Globus, UNICORE, OMII-UK and CROWN. The standards emerging from OGF are used by OMII-Europe to achieve interoperability.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardisation effort for grid computing. Several times a year, OGF brings together the worldwide grid community to discuss the latest developments. The attendees of these events work in the commercial sector, in research labs, in universities, in press and analyst firms, and in government. OGF20 was held from the 7th-11th of May in Manchester, UK and attracted 900 attendees.

OMII-Europe is an EU-funded project with 16 established partners from Europe, USA and China, one of whom is the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Our photo shows Alistair Dunlop (Project Manager) and Stephen Brewer (Deputy Project Manager) at the OMII-Europe exhibition stand.

Undergraduate and MSc students in ECS are celebrating the opening of the School’s new computing lab. Before building work began on the new lab, the students were surveyed to find out their priorities for the new space. It was then designed expressly to reflect their desire for group-working and lap-top use.

The layout of the lab makes best use of the area, with desks arranged where possible in islands of six. Most of the School group activities involve teams of four, five, or six. A break out area will provide six further group spaces, and can also be used for student seminars. The Helpdesk staff, Andrew Landells and Toby Hunt, have an expanded office within the lab, next to the entrance.

Dr Andrew Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, acted as project champion for the new lab. ‘The success of this new facility is about more than just the latest technology,’ he said. ‘An important reason that students work in the Lab is that they know things work pretty well almost all the time – and if something isn’t working, for whatever reason, the staff from our Helpdesk, or their fellow students, will be willing and able to sort the problem out.’

View podcast about our new computing lab.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, ECS Communications Manager (tel.023 8059 5453; email j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

ECS graduate Richard Jones has achieved spectacular success from his third-year computer science project. In 2002 Richard devised Audioscrobbler, which became a crucial part of Last.fm a year later. Yesterday (30 May 2007) Last.fm was sold to CBS for $280 million.

When Richard undertook his third-year project in 2002 he wanted to develop a system that would create a way of discovering new music, allowing the popularity of new artists to grow by word-of-mouth via a website dedicated to music enthusiasts. His ideas built on previous programs by including technology that could assess people’s tastes through monitoring what they actually listen to rather than relying on what they said they listened to.

‘Users of the system need to download software on to their computer that monitors the artists they listen to,’ Richard explained to the University Dolphin magazine in 2003. ‘The data is then collated and a pattern emerges by way of a technique known as “collaborative filteringâ€?. The results are recorded against a username and can be compared with the listening tastes of other members.’

At that time Audioscrobbler had 3000 users and Richard was planning to undertake a PhD in ECS to develop the service further. But the service became so successful that he decided to concentrate on expanding it after his graduation.

Audioscrobbler became a crucial part of the technology of Last.fm, a UK-based internet site combining radio and social networking, and Richard joined its founders, Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller on its board. The three board members of Last.fm were yesterday reported in the Financial Times to have gained $38 million each as a result of the sale to CBS.

‘INTERACTour’, an interactive tour guide for new students or visitors to Southampton, was the winner of the design competition which formed a major part of the new second year course on software development.

The course was created by Dr Steve Gunn and Dr Mark Weal with the aim of providing students with the skills to develop larger software projects, using the latest technologies. This year’s students, working in groups of five, were tasked with designing and developing a ‘Southampton Navigator’ to target a GPS-equipped mobile platform using the C# programming language.

The course culminated last week with a conference which included a keynote talk by Professor David De Roure of the ECS Pervasive Systems Centre, outlining his vision for the future of mobile computing.

Each team then presented their design and poster to compete for the Pervasive Systems Centre design prize. In a very strong field, the special features of the winning INTERACTour were its ability to orientate a new student or visitor to an unfamiliar area by providing an overview of that area’s facilities, using maps, summary descriptions, audio, icons, and photographs, all delivered to the user through the use of GPS co-ordinates. The students who designed INTERACTour were: Danvir Guram, Luke Lowrey, Adam Muncey, Nicholas Tudor, and Thomas York.

For the second year running an ECS team has won the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) competition at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, held this month in Hawaii.

The competition provides a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. Teams of agent researchers from universities around the world pit their agents against each other, enabling them to test whether their ideas about trust can feed into a generic problem. This year’s competition increased the number of player-agents from around 5 to 25-50. This tested the agents’ assessment of trust in larger populations, where they may not be able to interact with all their peers on a regular basis.

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. The winning margin of the Southampton IAM team was 50 per cent, a significant increase from last year’s margin of 30 per cent. Team member Dr Luke Teacy said that this may be explained by the larger number of agents in each game: ‘With more agents there is more opportunity for our agent to discover reliable peers to interact with, and so increase its own revenue’, he said.

The winning team was led by Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the IAM group.

Second-year Computer Science students David Askey, Julia Tomlinson, Alisdair Friis Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Heather Murray and Claire Pass made up the winning group in this year’s project competition.

John Hamshare of BAA had set the computer scientists the software task of obstacle visualization for Southampton Airport. This required managing and visualizing a database of the thousands of obstacles - such as trees, buildings, and motorway gantries – with the potential to infringe on safe flight paths. Four groups of computer scientists met and exceeded the project requirement in various ways, from faithful mimicking of the operational system to dynamic 3-D visualization.

The Electronics Group Design project was to design, build and test a system for testing different data encoding algorithms under the presence of noise betwen the transmitter and receiver. Teams were expected to design the transmiting and receiving circuitry as well as modules for injecting errors into the system and subsequently counting them. Of the 15 groups attempting the exercise three showed outstanding results, demonstrating complete end-to-end solutions.

Paul Fairbairn, in charge of University liaison at the IBM Hursley UK Research Laboratory, announced the best group of the year: computer scientists SEG10. Group members each received a cash prize, and will compete in the national IBM University Team Challenge at Hursley in September.

13 June 2007. Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee FRS has been appointed a member of the Order of Merit (OM) by HM Queen Elizabeth II. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Research Scientist at MIT, and Professor of Computer Science in ECS.

The Order of Merit, founded by 1902 by King Edward VII, is a special mark of honour conferred by the Sovereign on individuals of exceptional distinction in the arts, learning, sciences and other areas. Appointments to the Order are in the Sovereign's personal gift and ministerial advice is not required.