A new proposal to use the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to create and validate powerful new Open Access metrics of research impact will be presented this month by Professor Stevan Harnad.

Professor Harnad from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), pioneer of the Open Access movement, will deliver a keynote address at the 11th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics in Madrid from 25-27 June (alongside a keynote from scientometric pioneer and founder of the Institute of Scientific Information, Dr Eugene Garfield).

In his keynote, 'Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise', Professor Harnad will describe how he and his team at ECS will test old and new metric measures of research impact to validate their joint predictive power against traditional RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008.

‘This is a unique opportunity,’ said Professor Harnad. ‘The RAE is unique to the UK and the UK also leads the world in Open Access. We see Open Access Scientometrics as a rich new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analysing the growing Open Access research database, as well as providing powerful incentives to make it grow faster.’

Professor Harnad will also report new findings on the causal basis of the positive correlation between Open Access self-archiving and research impact.

Professor Harnad will deliver his keynote address at 9.30am on Monday 25 June.

An abstract of Professor Harnad’s keynote is available; in addition to an abstract of his new findings on Open Access self-archiving and research impact. Read a history of the Open Access movement.

Dr Averil Macdonald's contribution to the plastics industry was this week recognized by the award for Personal Contribution to the Plastics Industry. Over 45,000 schoolchildren in the UK have heard her Fantastic Plastic lecture, which was hosted from 2004 to 2006 by ECS.

How do you capture the imagination of GCSE students with the subject of plastics? Covering everything from Lego to false legs, Dr Macdonald keeps her young audiences enthralled with the multitude of applications and capabilities of plastics. Her talk and demonstration inspires students by revealing the physics and chemistry that give plastics their special properties.

The lecture has been hosted by a number of different academic institutions, providing a different flavour to the lecture from the different research specialisms of different universities. Between 2004 and 2006 Fantastic Plastic was hosted by ECS in Southampton, when the Principal Investigator was Dr Alun Vaughan of the School's Electrical Engineering group.

Earlier this year Dr Macdonald was honoured by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, when she was recognized as a Woman of Outstanding Achievement. She is based at the University of Reading, which is currently hosting Fantastic Plastic.

Three members of the School have been awarded Personal Chairs by the University. The title of ‘Professor’ goes to Dr Steve Gunn, Dr Alun Vaughan, and Dr Joao Marques-Silva, bringing the total number of Professors among the School’s 102 academic staff to 36.

Professor Steve Gunn was both an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Electronic Engineering at Southampton, before being appointed as a research fellow in ECS in 1998. He is a member of the Information: Signals, Images, Systems group, and his research covers two state-of-the-art areas: machine learning and computer vision. His work focuses on the development of techniques to convert these ill-posed inverse problems to well-posed problems through the careful design of a function space with an appropriate prior.

Professor Alun Vaughan researches in the area of the electrical properties of polymers and dielectric breakdown, understanding the processes of stress and ageing. He is a member of the ECS Electrical Power Engineering group and says that the group’s work in dielectrics is virtually unique in the UK. Next month the group will host a major international conference on the subject at Winchester.

Professor Joao Marques-Silva joined the School’s Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group in early 2006, from the Technical University of Lisbon. His research focuses on system verification, and he is interested in its enabling technologies: constraint solving and optimisation. ‘System verification is a key topic in industry,’ he says. ‘Large companies spend very large resources on this. New, more efficient verification algorithms are expected to increase system dependability and indirectly to bring large productivity gains.’

Boris Johnson MP, Shadow Minister for Higher Education, spent over an hour today (22 June) touring the construction of the new £55M Mountbatten Building. He was particularly impressed by the scale of the building and the potential of the work to be carried out there.

He was accompanied on his tour by Professor Harvey Rutt, Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, along with Professor Adam Wheeler, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University, and David Amos, Project Director for Bovis Lend Lease.

Mr Johnson was particularly interested to hear about Moore's Law and the extent to which the nanotechnology research to be carried out in the new Mountbatten Building would play a vital role in future developments as devices continue to gain in speed and decrease in size.

He was impressed by the scale of the building and the University's ambition for it to be world-leading research centre.

His tour of the Mountbatten Building site was part of a day-long visit to the University of Southampton which also included a tour of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Around 200 final-year students on the BEng, BSc and MEng courses received their final degree results today (22 June). After three or four years of hard work in the School, the presentation of final-year projects, and final exams which took place over the last few weeks, there were a large number of students gathered in Zepler Foyer to see the results being posted up. Celebrations began almost immediately and continued throughout the afternoon!

To get more of the atmosphere, read Read Rikki Prince's Degree Results Day blog.

Graduation ceremonies for ECS students will take place on Monday 23 July. The School currently has around 900 undergraduate students, and offers 23 undergraduate degree programmes.

Grid computing is promoted as the enabler for e-Science but may actually be missing the point. This is the argument that will be put forward by Professor David De Roure in his keynote address ‘e-Science is about Scientists too’ to be delivered tomorrow (Wednesday 27 June) at the eResearch Australasia conference in Brisbane.

‘Although it has the best intentions, the Grid is sometimes its own worst enemy’, said De Roure. ‘If we want to enable new science then we need to empower the scientist. Delivering a new infrastructure is only part of the solution.’

De Roure will argue that the grid community can learn from the evolution of the Web - and that e-Science developers should look to Web as well as Grid as their platform. ‘It remains a point of debate as to whether the functionality of the Grid can be delivered through the far simpler programming interfaces of the Web - I believe it can.’

De Roure, who pioneered the Semantic Grid initiative, is also organising the 2nd Grid and Web 2.0 workshop at the Open Grid Forum in Seattle (15-19 October 2007).

In the abstract of his paper to be given at Brisbane, De Roure writes: ‘eScience presents a vision of new scientific outcomes enabled by a new infrastructure. This cyberinfrastructure or eInfrastructure perspective brings with it a mindset of delivery of grid services to users. But is this approach fundamentally wrong? If we look at what researchers actually do, perhaps we will find that some new thinking is required. This talk promotes a people-centric perspective on eScience infrastructure and suggests that it is time to re-evaluate the Grid ambition.’

A conference being hosted in July by the School of Electronics and Computer Science will have great significance for the world's electrical supply industries.

At the 9th Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Solid Dielectrics, being hosted by ECS and held in Winchester from 8-13 July, physicists, chemists, material scientists and electrical engineers from around the world will gather together to discuss the future of dielectrics or electrical insulation.

According to the Conference Chair, Dr Paul Lewin of ECS, one of the big issues to be addressed is how we determine the condition of the insulation materials used in high voltage systems, a topic that is of crucial importance to the future of electrical transmission and distribution systems around the world.

'Most of the UK's power systems were installed in the 1960s, with a lifespan that was estimated at the time to be about 40 years,' he said. 'Our current challenge is to ensure continuity of supply by finding ways to predict when a piece of kit will fail.'

The conference will be opened by a keynote address entitled Ageing, Space Charge and Nanodielectrics: Ten Things We Don't Know About Dielectrics to be delivered by Professor John Fothergill from the University of Leicester on Monday 9 July.

As the name of this E O Forster Memorial Lecture suggests, Professor Fothergill will highlight the need for academics working in the field of dielectrics to be able to establish the age of a system and devise techniques for checking the state of ageing systems while they are in service. He will also explore the potential for the use of new insulation materials, like nanodielectrics.

In a full programme of presentations, 20 of which will be delivered by academics from the University of Southampton, the future of dielectrics will be explored.

'We know that many parts of the UK system are probably nearing the end of their useful life,' said Dr George Chen of ECS. 'We can replace them, but the costs are enormous so, not surprisingly, the industry wants to get the best value out of what it has already installed. What we really need to do is understand how to tell when a transformer or a cable is about to fail, so that it can be replaced just in time, minimizing the inconvenience and the cost to consumers.'

A research project carried out by ECS Master of Engineering student Sabrina Nefti has identified three research challenges that will need to be addressed before pervasive healthcare becomes a reality.

Sabrina, a final year student of the MEng Master of Engineering degree within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who will graduate in July, carried out a review of the current medical sensor technology designed to make independent living a reality for the elderly.

She has recommended that further research is needed into hybrid platforms, sensor design, and combining environmental health and activity monitoring systems.

'The UK population aged over 65 is estimated to rise from 9.3 million to 16.8 million over the next 50 years,' she said. 'A wealth of research has begun in pervasive healthcare which, as it develops, will allow patients to lead an independent lifestyle in their own homes.'

According to Sabrina, the use of sensors alone to monitor a person's activities, for example hand washing, can leave a subtle gap in information as the sensor for example, reports that the tap is opened but not that the person has washed his/her hands. She recommends the fusion of a RFID tag, an infra-red system and an acoustic system to provide more effective monitoring.

'I acknowledge that while hybrid platforms may be the way forward to bridge the gap, they are harder to integrate,' she said. 'Fusion techniques that require minimal cost and complexity need to be investigated.'

Sabrina also recommends the development of new sensors with high-level signal processing and transmission capabilities, and highlights the fact that her review revealed no research aimed at combining environmental health and activity monitoring systems.

'Such a house system which would be capable of sensing changes in an individual's activities would be a breakthrough in the field of remote predictive healthcare,' she said.

Sabrina was supervised by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, who recently set up the University of Southampton’s Pervasive Systems Centre, which brings together multidisciplinary expertise from across the school's research groups, ranging from sensors and wireless communications to computer science theory and practice, all working those making independent living for the elderly a reality.

A generator that is 10 times more powerful than any other similar devices has been developed by engineers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Dr Steve Beeby and his team at the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed a kinetic energy generator which generates electrical energy from the vibrations and movements present within its environment.

'This is the most successful generator of its kind and generates energy much more efficiently than any similar device of its size,' said Dr Beeby.

The generator, which is less than 1 cubic cm in size, was developed as part of the EU-funded є4.13 million VIBES (Vibration Energy Scavenging) project. It has been designed to power wireless sensors that monitor the condition of industrial plant and is intended to be installed within an air compressor unit supplying several laboratories within a building.

It could also be used in wireless, self-powered tyre sensors and if developed further, could even form the basis of technology for self-powered pace makers. The technology offers the potential to replace or augment batteries. The periodic replacement of batteries is not feasible for embedded applications and is highly unattractive in wireless sensor networks containing hundreds of sensor nodes.

'Vibration energy harvesting is receiving a considerable amount of interest as a means for powering wireless sensor nodes,' said Dr Beeby. 'The big advantage of wireless sensor systems is that by removing wires and batteries, there is the potential for embedding sensors in previously inaccessible locations.'

According to Dr Beeby, over the years, there has been a growing interest in the field of low power miniature sensors and wireless sensor networks, but an area that has received comparatively little attention is how to supply the required electrical power to such sensors, particularly if the sensor is completely embedded in the structure with no physical connection to the outside world. He believes that the VIBES generator could hold the solution.

A paper entitled A micro electromagnetic generator for vibration energy harvesting about this research has just been published on the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering website and can be accessed at: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-ffissn=0960-1317/-ff30=all/0960-1317/17/7/007

Dr Beeby and his team plan to exploit this application further through Perpetuum, the world-leading vibration energy-harvesting company which was formed in 2004 as a spin out from the University of Southampton.

Other collaborators in the VIBES project are: Tima - Techniques of Informatics and MicroElectronics for Computer Architecture, France, 01dB-Metravib, France, Phillips Applied Technologies, Belgium, MEMSCAP, France, Femto-st, Dept. LPMO - Laboratory of Physics and the measurement of oscillator, France, Phillips Research, Eindhoven, Netherlands, EPFL- Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne, Laboratoire de Céramique, Switzerland.

The latest podcast on the ECS News student channel showcases the MEng Individual Research project, through the work of six students, including Emma Lee-Choon.

The IRP is an ambitious project, which is supervised by academic staff on an individual basis and undertaken within the academic’s research group. The student undertakes and reports on research in a particular field and presents the results in paper form, conference presentation and poster. This results in a real awareness of research methods, giving students an insight into the research culture of the School and helping to encourage them either to stay in the School to study for a PhD, or to seek a research-focused job in industry.

Students talking about their IRP in the podcast are Charles Pickers, Emma Lee-Choon, Anthony Ambrus, Sabrina Nefti, Ian Cooper, and Rebecca Coath.