The School's student-run Electronics and Computer Science Society is the first student society in the UK to be officially recognized as a student chapter by the British Computer Society.

The Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS) was established only three years ago to provide a full programme of talks, careers information, social and sports events for the School's 900 undergraduate students. Trademark events also include gaming competitions, games for girls events involving local schools, and special events for international women's day and science and technology week.

Now as part of the BCS, student Reena Pau says that more events will be organized to enable ECS students to keep in touch with the BCS and its broad range of activities which support computer science education in the UK. The School has strong links with the BCS: Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS is currently President of the organization and Professor Wendy Hall of ECS was President in 2003-4.

'I'm really looking forward to what we will achieve through this partnership,' said Reena, who is also BCS representative for Hampshire Young Professionals. 'If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for future events, we'll be delighted to hear from them at society@ecs.soton.ac.uk.'

Professor Margaret Ross of Southampton Solent University, who is President of the BCS Hampshire Branch, said: 'I am so proud of the members of the Society at the University of Southampton since they raised the concept of being recognized as a Chapter of the Hampshire Branch. Following a year of negotiations, it has now been formally agreed. This will bring closer links between the students and BCS professional members and we look forward to a strong collaboration in the future.'

The Southampton student branch of the IEEE, which is administered from ECS, has received an award from the organization for registering the best membership expansion in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The IEEE student branch received their award on the basis of Outstanding Leadership and Results in IEEE Membership Development Activities. The branch also won the regional award, again covering member groups in Europe, Africa and the Middle East for the quality of their web site, and are awaiting the results of the global web site competition.

The IEEE branch runs a full programme of seminars and social events throughout the year.

An ECS-designed system which relies on computerised agents to act on its behalf during emergency scenarios has been awarded a RoboCupRescue championship prize.

A team from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) was voted winner of the infrastructure competition in the RoboCupRescue World Championships (www.robocuprescue.org) which was held in Atlanta this month.

The team, led by Professor Nick Jennings, ECS Professor of Computer Science, developed ECSKernel, a simulator that plugs into a multi-agent research test bed.

ECSKernel was designed as part of ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data), a five-year project funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to research agent-based technologies to work in emergency situations.

The ECSKernel provides a number of functionalities that allow researchers to benchmark their coordination, multi-agent learning, and other agent-based techniques under settings that mimic the real world.

The Infrastructure Competition is a contest organised within the RobocupRescue Simulation league and aims at selecting the best infrastructure components that have been developed.

These infrastructure components will then be developed as part of the RobocupRescue Agent Simulation platform. The latter simulates the events that happen during a disaster in a given city and provides the framework for researchers to build agents that will represent emergency responders trying to mitigate the disaster. As such it provides a realistic playground for demonstrating, testing, and evaluating multi-agent systems based techniques that have been developed.

Professor Jennings commented: ‘This work highlights the importance of using advanced computer techniques for real world problems such as disaster response. We are happy to be at the forefront of work in this area and hope that many other groups around the world will use and build upon the system we have developed.’

The members of the ECSKernel design team led by Professor Jennings were: Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Alex Rogers, Kate Macarthur, Perukrishnen Vytelingum, and Alessandro Farinelli.

A new initiative to produce solution-based software is being launched next month by OMII-UK.

The new initiative, Software Solutions for e-Research, will provide packages to enable research to be conducted more effectively. It will be demonstrated at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting being held at the East Midlands Conference Centre from 10 to 13 September.

OMII-UK, a collaboration between the Universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester, was founded last year by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the UK e-Science Core programme. OMII-UK has already released software to perform chemistry simulations and clinical workflows ranging from the analysis of genes to weather forecasting.

According to Neil Chue Hong, Director of OMII-UK, they have now found ways to package software that will change how people approach their research.

'We are meeting a need that no one has fully addressed yet,' he said. 'We are not making impossible research possible, but what we are doing is allowing people easier access to computing infrastructures to make it easier for them to do their research.'

At their stand (Booth 16) at the All Hands Meeting, OMII-UK will demonstrate new packages they are developing, including Taverna Workbench, a user-driven tool, which will allow the management of several workflows through one easy-to-use graphical interface.

They will also launch a new data management system which will enable researchers to publish and share specific datasets and Campus Grid Toolkit which will make it possible for campuses to incorporate unused machines into a campus grid.

'Our goal is to provide solution-focused software which is of real value to researchers,' said Mr Chue Hong. 'There is lots of software out there produced by ourselves and others. What we are doing is showing people how to put it together in a way that facilitates their research.'

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School of Electronics and Computer Science, lectured on advances in optoelectronics last week to students of Delhi Public School, Rohini.

His lecture was held under the auspices of the Delhi College of Engineering Chapter of the SPIE. Professor Rutt is a regular visitor to India and has undertaken many lectures there over recent years. 'I am very pleased to give these talks,' he said. 'They attract large audiences who seem fascinated by the technology. Many have no idea that they use optoelectronics every day, every time they use the Internet, make a long-distance phone call, or a banking transaction.

'The lectures often lead to very lively question and answer sessions - sometimes making me think very hard to answer a question which goes right back to basics, or comes from an unfamiliar angle.'

Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt.

Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future.

‘AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science – it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,’ says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

‘Computers are now one million times more powerful than when I started my research career – no field has come close to this rate of development,’ he says. ‘If transport had progressed at the same rate we would be flying from London to New York in less than a tenth of second.’

Professor Shadbolt instances the immensely powerful computing systems that can beat the world’s best chess players, translate documents on the Web from one language to another, and build robots that hoover the house, but points out that ‘these systems are not agonising about their existence or whether we are about to switch them off’.

He believes that we are now seeing the emergence of Assistive Intelligence which can be characterized as a different kind of AI. ‘These results can be seen everywhere,’ he says. ‘Rather than being conscious brains in a box, as Hollywood would have it, they are in fact small pieces of adaptive and flexible software that help drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.’

And he sees this as a trend that will continue. ‘There will be micro-intelligences all around us – systems that are very good and adaptive at particular tasks, and we will be immersed in environments stuffed full of helpful devices.’

Professor Shadbolt thinks that we will also see this happen in the Web and has been researching the next generation Web with Professor Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, and a co-director with him of the Web Science Research Initiative.

‘What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem,’ says Professor Shadbolt, ‘involving lots of simple systems which connect millions of complex ones – humans!

‘And when you have millions of people using smart software you start to see really interesting properties – forms of Collective Intelligence, such as Wikipedia, which is the communal expression of a great deal of our encyclopaedic knowledge. The Web will be smart because it will have assistive intelligence connecting human intelligence together.’

But, concludes Professor Shadbolt: ‘You don’t need to worry about the robot next door deciding to make a bid for world domination!’

Professor Shadbolt will present these ideas with a range of examples in his lecture, to be given as part of the British Association Festival of Science in York, at 6 pm, Bedern Hall, Bartle Garth, York, on Tuesday 11 September.

An ECS Apprentices event for children aged 7-14 and their parents attracted a capacity audience who were able to enjoy a full programme of events and find out more about the ICT curriculum from experts.

The event was organized by ECS PhD student Reena Pau and held as part of the Higher Education Academy-Information and Computer Sciences conference, hosted by the Learning Societies Lab in the ECS.

The ECS Apprentices workshop aimed to give children a better understanding of what it’s like to be at university, and to encourage them to start thinking about computing in the future. The participants learned about slime moulds and their potential role in computing, as well as creating drama and poster presentations. Parents also had the opportunity to discuss the ICT national curriculum courses with John Woollard of the School of Education, and find out more about what they can do to encourage their children with ICT at home.

This is one of a number of events that Reena has organized in the School over the last year and, she says, this one was particularly full of laughter and fun!

The web site of the Southampton student branch of the prestigious IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) has been named best in the world in a competition that was open to all IEEE student branches.

The Southampton student branch is administered from the School of Electronics and Computer Science and it has gone from strength to strength since it was established in 2004. Earlier this year the group also received an award from the IEEE for registering the best membership expansion in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, commented: 'ECS is delighted that the student branch of the IEEE has achieved such success. Congratulations go to the Committee for their hard work and commitment in running such a strong programme of events throughout the year, and also to Geoff Merrett, for designing and managing a very dynamic web site.'

The IEEE is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The Southampton branch is the 15th in the UK and the first to be Women-in-Engineering affiliated.

The IEEE student branch runs a full programme of events throughout the year, including technical presentations, careers talks, and social events. For further information, see the group's web site.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, an expert in foundations of ubiquitous computing at the University of Southampton, has been invited by two prestigious organisations to help raise the profile of the discipline.

Professor Sassone, Professor of Computer Science at the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), whose main research agenda lies in the development of high-level paradigms for global ubiquitous computing, has been appointed as Chairman of The European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) and as a co-organiser of the Royal Society meeting on 'From computers to ubiquitous computing, by 2020'.

According to Professor Sassone, his role in these two events will enable him to devise strategies to attract the best software researchers in the field.

ETAPS, established in 1998, is the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics relating to software science. Established in 1998, it is a confederation of five main annual conferences.

'Although ETAPS is only 10 years old, it has become one of the best software science conferences in the world,' said Professor Sassone. 'My main aim during my three year chairmanship is to make ETAPS the natural home for the best software scientists and engineers in the field and to encourage them to submit their work to the conference.' As one of the organisers of the Royal Society scientific discussion meeting which will take place in March 2008, Professor Sassone will help position ubiquitous computing as one of the scientific Grand Challenges of our time and pave the way towards making it a reality by 2020. This discussion meeting will also cover social and legal implications of ubiquitous computing. Co-organisers of this event are Professor Marta Kwiatkowska, University of Oxford, and Professor Tom Rodden, University of Nottingham.

Professor Sassone is also part of an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded team which will look at extending this challenge to an international context.

'We will need to build a solid foundation in computing and develop ways to predict the behaviour of systems if we are to meet this challenge,' said Professor Sassone. 'The fact that the Royal Society has recognised ubiquitous computing as a grand challenge and decided to dedicate to it one of its prestigious scientific discussion meetings is a major step forward and one which will help bring the topic to the attention of the wider community.'

A pioneering system developed by ECS researchers along with the School of Health Professions and Rehabilitation Sciences aims to retrain weak or paralysed muscles in patients who have suffered brain damage as a result of a stroke.

The system is being trialled at the University and local people are needed to participate in trials so that this technology can be made widely available.

Researchers from the University’s School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences and the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed a technology to help stroke patients to re-learn movement.

Dr Jane Burridge from the School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences who is leading the research commented: ‘As far as we know, nobody has tried using a technique called iterative learning control, to help people who have had a stroke to move again. It is a great example of how state of the art control theory, normally used for industrial robots, can be applied to challenges in rehabilitation.’

Now, 18 months into the three year project, the researchers have tested the technology on healthy people and proved that it works and now want to carry out trials with local people who have suffered strokes.

Working with stroke patients, the team will look at how electrical stimulation to contract appropriate muscles through electrodes attached to the skin can be controlled to enable stroke patients to successfully perform tasks. The patient will attempt to track a moving target over a two dimensional plane by moving a joy-stick. The patient’s movement will be measured to detect the tracking error and calculations made to adjust the level and timing of stimulation so that the error is corrected. The ultimate aim is that through repetition, voluntary movement will improve, thus gradually reducing the need for artificial stimulation.

Dr Paul Lewin at ECS commented: ‘This is a very challenging project as it is the first time in Europe that this technology has been applied to humans. With robots, behaviour is entirely predictable, you can make them perform a task perfectly every time. People often reach a natural plateau in their performance, but if you can get them to repeat moves using certain tasks, they have a much better chance of recovery.’

Dr Burridge added: ‘This is a very exciting development of what could prove to be a user friendly way of enabling recovery of movement in patients who are severely disabled.

Local people living near to Southampton who are interested in knowing more about the study or participating in the trials should contact: Dr Jane Burridge, Email: sjh2jo6@soton.ac.uk,or ah10@soton.ac.uk Tel: 023 8059 8927