The latest landmark building on the University's Highfield Campus was formally opened by Baroness Platt of Writtle on 9 July. Half of the building's four floors are occupied by ECS computer science research groups.

The striking new £18 million building, opened by Baroness Platt, is the latest stage in the programme to redesign the main entrance to the University in Highfield. Located on University Road, close to the Library, the building has a 430- seat lecture theatre and houses teaching and research facilities for staff and students of the University’s Schools of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Education, as well as the offices of the University’s security section.

Research carried out by ECS Master of Engineering students has highlighted the most effective ways of identifying individuals in public spaces.

In two separate research projects, two final year students of the MEng Master of Engineering Degree within the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), Sarah Deane and Matthew Sharifi, who will graduate this month, addressed the growing importance of being able to identify individuals within a given environment, both from a security and marketing perspective.

Sarah’s project, A Comparison of Background Subtraction Techniques, highlighted the fact that most current Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) footage fails to give a clear image of an object because it is often obscured by background information.

Having reviewed several existing methods for taking away the background information and not finding any of them particularly effective, Sarah used several of these theories, combining them into her own implementation.

‘I found that background subtraction, although being simply defined as a difference between the background image without objects of interest and an observed image, has many difficult issues to overcome,’ said Sarah. ‘It was apparent that a simple subtraction algorithm was needed to allow the high computational efficiency that is required by CCTV applications.’

Matthew’s project, Audience Recognition in Public Spaces, compared the effectiveness of face recognition and Bluetooth as a means of recognising individuals within a public space.

He found that a camera positioned in a reception area was able to detect all of the frontal faces that came into contact with the system, whereas Bluetooth only managed to recognise 8.33 per cent of those who passed and was dependant on these individuals carrying Bluetooth devices.

The results have inspired Matthew to conduct a much larger video dataset, so that he can carry out further experiments.

‘Having observed the advantages and disadvantages of both Bluetooth and face recognition, it would be interesting to combine the two techniques into a multi-modal identification technology which could couple the ubiquity of face recognition with the recognition accuracy of Bluetooth,’ he said.

ECS communications researcher Jos Akhtman is part of the Southampton team whose robot submarine won a highly competitive European student challenge this month.

The student-led team from the University of Southampton was competing in the European Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge (SAUC-E), hosted at Haslar in Gosport by Qinetiq. Teams had to design, build and test their submarines, and over the four days Southampton triumphed, winning both the overall competition and an award for innovation in autonomy.

The team's robot submarine Soton AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) displayed good hydrodynamics, propulsion and battery backup to successfully complete a series of underwater tasks without human interference, beating the five other teams from universities from the UK and France.

This was the second year running that Southampton had entered with a team from its Schools of Engineering Sciences, Electronics and Computer Science, and the Underwater Systems Laboratory at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. The team had developed a three webcam image-recognition system as part of a high-level control system that could map and recognize objects. Sponsorship came from REAP Systems Ltd and TSL Technology Ltd.

Team captain, Alex Phillips, a first-year PhD student in the School of Engineering Sciences, summed up the day: 'We put in loads of hard work and are very pleased that the Soton AUV performed on the day.

'As each successive team attempted the course we began to realise that our run might be enough, with many teams suffering mechanical, control, software or operational failures. It felt great at the dinner to be awarded the prize for winning the competition and especially that for innovation in autonomy.'

Southampton team members who took part were Jos Akhtman, Maaten Furlong, Alistair Palmer, Alex Philips, Suleiman Sharkh, and Stephen Turnock.

Designed to inspire innovation and encourage the next generation of scientists and engineers to think about underwater technology and its future possibilities, the event is organised by the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

A new professor in ECS will work on making smaller, more powerful computers and mobile phones a reality when the new Mountbatten Building opens next year.

Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, who has joined the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) believes that the state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary research complex facilities planned for the new £55 million University of Southampton Mountbatten Building, which is due to open in mid-2008, will allow him to carry out extensive research into nanotechnology.

‘The new clean room under construction in the building, the high level of expertise available to me and the possibility of collaboration with other strong groups such as the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and academics in engineering science, physics and chemistry, will allow me to develop more hybrid devices and systems,’ he said.

Professor Mizuta made a major contribution to the field when he and his colleagues developed a high-speed single-electron memory and a new memory device called PLEDM TM (Phase-state Low Electron-number Drive Memory), which is a single chip which enables instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information while consuming very little power, when he was a laboratory manager for Hitachi in Cambridge.

At ECS, Professor Mizuta plans to combine the conventional top-down approach to silicon nanoelectronics with a bottom-up approach which will enable him to introduce atomically-controlled nanoscale building blocks such as nanodots, nanowires and nanotubes to make his unique nanodevices.

‘We now need a paradigm shift from conventional ‘More Moore’ technology to ‘More than Moore’ and ‘Beyond CMOS’(complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor) technologies. I believe that if we adopt unique properties of well-controlled nanostructures and co-integration with other emerging technologies such as NEMS, nanophotonics and nanospintronics, we can develop extremely functional information processing devices, faster than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional ‘More Moore’ technologies,’ he said.

Peter Molyneux, Chief Executive of Lionhead Studios, has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Southampton.

Peter Molyneux is one of the UK's top entrepreneurs in the field of computer games. He has been behind many of the ground-breaking, award-winning computer games of the last 15 years including Populous, Theme Park, Black and White, and Fable. Cumulative sales of these games now top 10 million.

His company Lionhead Studios is one of the leading and most innovative computer game design companies in the UK and was recently bought by Microsoft.

As well as receiving his honorary degree at the University graduation ceremony, Peter Molyneux also toured the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He is pictured here (right) in the undergraduate computing lab with Chris Lord (centre), who graduated this year with a First Class Honours MEng degree in Computer Science, and is now working for OpenedHand, developing software applications for embedded devices running Linux, and Tony Ambrus (left), who also graduated this year with a First Class Honours MEng degree in Computer Science and is working for the games company Rare.

Letu Yang, a PhD student in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group, won the prize for Best Student Paper at the Communicating Process Architecture conference.

Letu's paper, 'JCSProB: Implementing Integrated Formal Specifications in Concurrent Java', was written with his supervisor Dr Mike Poppleton. The paper presents a development strategy and tool support for constructing concurrent Java programs from combined B and CSP formal specifications in the ProB tool.

The Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) conference is an annual international academic conference on the development of concurrent systems for both software and hardware. This year's event was held at the University of Surrey and included an invited presentation from Turing Award winner, Professor Tony Hoare.

Letu said: 'I was very nervous before my presentation since it was the first time I had presented at a conference like this. But it generated a lot of discussion afterwards, and I was very pleased to be awarded the prize for Best Student Paper on the final day, including a bottle of 12-year old malt whisky!'

Letu is pictured here, second from the right.

The glass panels for the external wall of the new £55M Mountbatten Building are currently under manufacture in Austria.

The glass panels are being made by Eckelt Glass and will form a striking feature of the new Mountbatten Building when it opens in 2008.

The new building will provide a world-class interdisciplinary clean room and office complex for the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

The new Mountbatten Building will be a four-storey concrete-framed building, fully linked at all levels to the Zepler Building, with an associated central utilities building and external single-storey service buildings. The building features an exciting design by specialist architects Jestico+Whiles ensuring not only that it provides flexible interdisciplinary space for research in nanotechnology and photonics, but that the world-leading research to be carried out there is visible and accessible from the south concourse.

To find out more watch video podcasts of the construction progress.

A new simulator developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, which has been downloaded over 100 times over the last couple of months, will pave the way for smaller, more competitive handheld computing devices.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and his team at the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed NIRGAM (Network-on-Chip Interconnect RoutinG and Applications Modelling), a simulator which will make it possible to easily connect up the various cores which exist within a System-on-Chip (SoC).

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, as the demand for more functionality from hand-held devices increases, the current interconnection techniques will not be adequate to support more powerful devices, due to limited bandwidth scalability.

'The microelectronics industry predicts that in 2008 SoCs will contain over 50 processing and memory blocks and this will increase to 100 cores in 2012,' he said.

This led to Professor Al-Hashimi and Professor Alex Yakovlev at the University of Newcastle securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in 2005 to develop the next generation of interconnection technology for multiprocessor SoCs, from which NIRGAM has been developed.

‘The availability of such a simulator will be welcomed by the SoC and Network-on-Chip (NoC) research communities since it allows researchers to plug-in and experiment with different applications and routing algorithms using different traffic and topologies,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi. ‘The availability of such a simulator is vital for researchers since it will enable them to evaluate quickly their routing algorithms and applications on a NoC platform, and without the need to develop long programs.’

ECS Partners Ltd, a pioneering consultancy company run by academics in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), has notched up business worth almost one million pounds over four years.

Thirty academics and other researchers are developing their cutting-edge research alongside leading companies and organisations in the UK and across the world through ECS Partners Ltd.

This unique model of consultancy aids researchers to get their work into the marketplace and provides world-class expertise for technology firms.

It was the brainchild of Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School over the last five years. ‘This is state-of-the-art research which is ready to be applied practically and needs to be tested with industry. Our academics are keen to take part because the consultancy work is related directly to the projects they are working on,’ she said.

Research and development consultancy currently under way through ECS Partners Ltd includes:

• Eprints – specialist repository software to enable educational institutions and companies to make information available to all through open access websites.

• Development work on the next generation of web technology – the ‘semantic web’.

• Nanotechnology, the science of the very small, in the electronics industry.

ECS Partners Ltd was set up to administer the consultancy. The company is not designed to generate significant revenue for the School and most profits are returned directly to the individual academics after the marginal costs of running the business have been taken out. What profit the company does make is put back into ECS for the benefit of staff and students.

The company was created with support and advice from the University’s Centre for Enterprise and Innovation (CEI). Consultancy Manager Robin Axford from CEI said: ‘ECS is helping to change the way industry and academics work together in Southampton.'

From today (1 August) the School of Electronics and Computer Science has a new Head. Professor Harvey Rutt has taken up office as Head of School for the next five years in succession to Professor Wendy Hall.

Professor Harvey Rutt, a keen mountaineer, pilot and deep sea diver, is used to taking controlled risks in his personal life. He intends to adopt this philosophy in his leadership of ECS as he takes over from Professor Wendy Hall, who has been Head of School for the last five years.

As Deputy Head of ECS since 2002, Professor Rutt was part of the team which put the School back on course after the devastating fire in 2005. He is one of the masterminds behind the new £55 million clean room, currently under construction, which will be the best in Europe. State-of-the-art facilities like this are essential to the School’s continuing success, but Professor Rutt also points to more traditional values:

‘One of our great strengths is the breadth of our activities,’ he stresses. ‘From nano devices to high voltage engineering, and from systems on a chip to the worldwide scale of the Web, the Head of School must utilize the full range of our capability in Electronics, Computer Science and Power Engineering.’

He remains passionate about his own research and is on the brink of developing a terahertz microscope which will be 100 times faster than any existing and will be a very powerful device for studying materials. Looking at the way in which terahertz radiation interacts with biological molecules, and how infrared radiation can be used to assist in the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease or aid neurosurgeons, are also areas which fascinate him.

Professor Rutt is keen for academics to be bolder about research and one of his initial steps into the unknown was the decision to abandon CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor), a traditional fabrication process which offers certainty, in favour of a broader range of novel technologies. These, often based on nanotechnology and quantum processes, offer far more potential in the design of smaller, faster, more powerful devices.

‘For over 30 years the advance of electronics has depended on CMOS and "Moore’s lawâ€? which says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years,’ he said. ‘But Gordon Moore himself has said that â€?Moore’s law is deadâ€?. Devices are now so small that new physical effects take over, and we can’t just follow the CMOS road; the dead end is in sight. We need whole new technologies and approaches – that’s real research, where we should focus’, says Professor Rutt.

As he takes over leadership of ECS, he also pledges to make prompt, effective decisions.

'Although I have great respect for the academic approach to life and its openness and debate, I find its indecisiveness and its strange ambivalence about taking risks in research frustrating,' he said. 'To use a sporting analogy, if you have problems 40 metres underwater or half-way up a mountain, you don't delay in making a decision. You make your decision, move on and live with the consequences. I would like to see us adopting a similar approach to our academic life.'