A-level students in Southampton are about to embark on an exciting competition to build their own robots.

Led by a group of University students, 10 teams from schools and colleges around Southampton will spend the next six months designing and building robots which will compete against each other in a grand final to be held at the University next spring.

In the future robots will be part of our daily lives, performing tasks in the home, and assisting us while we work, travel, and spend our leisure time.

The Southampton Student Robotics Competition is designed to highlight this aspect of robotics, and the 70 A-level students will be encouraged to produce robots which are sophisticated, capable of programmed movement to perform set tasks, able to ‘see’, and make best use of their own artificial intelligence.

The University students have raised substantial funds to enable them to support the school teams in their robot design and construction between now and April when the grand final takes place. Sponsors of the competition are the Motorola Foundation, Southampton University Students Union (SUSU), and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University.

Each team will be mentored by a University student who will visit the school every week. The students have spent the summer building components and designing the competition, and full details will be revealed to the school teams when they all meet at the University this Friday.

‘This is the first opportunity for all the school teams to meet and find out exactly what they will be doing,’ said Stephen English, an Electronics student in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is leading the University Student Robotics team. ‘This is a challenging competition and we are convinced that we are going to see some really innovative ideas and applications coming out of it.’

The event at the University this Friday (28 September) takes place in the Garden Court, Highfield Campus, between 12 noon and 4 pm. The school teams will undertake a team-building exercise, as well as hearing presentations on what the competition will involve.

An ECS team which won an automated trading agent competition believe their entry may form the basis for an automated stock market.

Professor Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science, led a team which won the Trading-Agent Competition (TAC) - CAT Tournament which was held in Toronto in July. The other team members were Dr Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Dr Ioannis Vetsikas and Dr Raj Dash. The team is now developing this automated stock market further.

The aim of the competition was to create software that would control a stock market, populated by automated trading agents, in the most effective way. In particular, this involved adjusting the market parameters (the cost of listings, the amount of information given out to traders and the fees charged) to create a market that is more appealing than the others that are available.

The ECS team, ‘IAMwildCAT’, beat nine other teams, with a score four times higher than the team with the lowest score. The overall outcome is based on how the competing markets increase their market share, at the same time as increasing the amount of profit they make and their transaction success rate over a number of trading days.

‘There are now lots of different stock markets/exchanges around the world, many of which have shifted online,’ said Professor Jennings. ‘All of these exchanges compete with one another for business and the one which works best with its different parameters will get the majority of the business. This was the case for ECS in the CAT competition. We won because we adapted the terms and conditions of our exchange to respond favourably to changing market conditions.’

This is the second computerised agent competition that a team led by Professor Jennings won this year, in July ECS also won the RoboCupRescue World Championships which was held in Atlanta.

The ARGUS project, a large-scale research programme involving BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Qinetiq, and the Universities of Oxford and Southampton, has received The Engineer Technology and Innovation Award 2007.

This prestigious new award scheme is intended to recognize the significant contributions being made to the UK’s technology economy by universities and industry working together. ARGUS received the Award for Large Company and University Collaboration.

ARGUS is addressing data fusion — how different sources of data can be integrated so that the resulting information is better than any one source. The project was initiated to meet future needs for distributed information processing technologies that can deal with the uncertainty endemic in our world. Its goal was to close the gap between the science of data fusion and the engineering needs of UK industry, where data fusion and signal processing are enabling technologies.

The ARGUS project, now in its fourth year, combines two technologies for the first time. The Southampton team, led by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, is concerned with ‘agents’, computer programs that act on behalf of humans, with minimal intervention. ‘We’re interested in systems where a number of these autonomous agents interact with each other, where they have to co-operate, negotiate or co-ordinate,’ he said.

The Oxford team, led by Professor Steve Roberts, is applying Bayesian inference to engineering and life-science problems. When information is incomplete, Bayesian techniques can help work out what are the most likely outcomes of particular actions.

Working together the teams have developed software that allows agents to communicate with each other to solve complex problems involving uncertainty. Each of the three industrial partners is using these approaches for specific problems, involving air traffic control, wide-area surveillance, and aircraft engine service-scheduling.

The challenging nature of the research has brought the groups together: ‘We’ve all taken turns at doing things we wouldn’t have chosen to do on our own,’ says Professor Jennings, ‘and everyone has pulled into the project. For me, it’s the best example of a collaborative project I’ve done, and I’ve been doing them for over 20 years.’

The ECS team, based in Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia, comprises: Professor Nick Jennings, Dr Alex Rogers, Dr Talal Rahwan, Dr Rajdeep Dash, and Dr Perukrishnen Vytelingum.

The project is due to finish next year, but the Oxford and Southampton groups have formed a strategic partnership project with BAE called Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks (ALADDIN) to take the research forward. Aimed primarily at developing disaster management systems, ALADDIN is extending the use of independent agents and uncertainty-based reasoning into areas where resources are limited and continually shifting.For more information go to www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~argus/

New ways to search and archive images found on the World Wide Web will be revealed by Dr Jonathan Hare at a Royal Institution lecture in London on 4 October.

Dr Jonathon Hare, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science will join Dr Ewan Birney from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Dr Timo Hannay, Publishing Director at Nature.com to deliver a Royal Institution of Great Britain lecture entitled Searching for Science on Thursday 4 October.

Dr Hare has recently successfully completed a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brighton, which investigated the semantic gap in image retrieval. In this lecture he will reveal how his work with the holders of image collections has enabled them to search much more efficiently by incorporating an analysis of image content and annotations into their search and then use machine learning techniques so that the computer can learn to sort new photos itself.

‘Google photo-searches involve the search engine searching the words around images rather than the images themselves,’ said Dr Hare. ‘One of the unique aspects of our approach is that we have worked with real image collections and found ways to do an analysis of the images themselves rather than just the background information. The use of machine learning techniques means that in the future, the computer can be programmed to find images which may have no surrounding text by just using the visual content.

’Searching for Science will take place at the Apple Store, 235 Regent Street, London W1B 2ET on Thursday 4 October from 7-8.30pm.

Over 400 new students are being welcomed to the School this week. Among events taking place is the ECS JumpStart programme for Freshers in the School.

The influx of new students comprise around 250 undergraduates taking courses in Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering, and Information Technology in Organisations. During this week the new undergraduates have been experiencing a specially designed programme which introduces them to the School, the University, the City of Southampton, and their fellow students. JumpStart has been devised and managed this year by Sean Nuzum, a final-year student in Electronic Engineering and the reaction from the freshers has been very positive.

One of the tasks involves a group Treasure Hunt around Southampton concluding in the construction of a poster which highlights memorable parts of the City.

The School's MSc programme has attracted 136 students who are taking one of eight different programmes. Yesterday the students went on a four-hour boat trip from Ocean Village to the Isle of Wight, as part of their own induction programme.

Around 80 PhD and EngD students are also joining ECS. This will be an momentous year for the School since it will see the completion and opening of the new £55M Mountbatten Building.

ECS researchers have developed a new e-learning portal for Higher Education. The new portal is powered by semantic wikis, but is also simple enough to be embraced by non-technical users.

The FREMA (e-Framework Reference Model for Assessment) project, part of the Joint Information Systems Committee’s (JISC) e-Learning Framework, is a large inter-connected portal which will house information about e-learning assessment relevant to the education community.

It has been developed by Dr David Millard and Dr Gary Wills of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who will launch the new FREMA portal at a JISC e-Learning programme meeting on 11 October. It will be hosted by ECS at: http://frema.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wiki/

FREMA began in 2005 to help people in Higher Education build systems for e-learning. Its goal was to develop a reference model for systems in the Assessment Domain which focus upon the creation, execution and recording of electronic assessments which are accessible across institutions and to the lifelong learner.

According to Dr Millard, FREMA is a type of wiki with all the resources representing various aspects of Assessment in Higher Education such as information on standards and funding, but it can be queried like a Knowledge Base, so that users can find gaps and trends in the domain.

'A huge advantage of this system over any similar ones is its simplicity,' said Dr Millard. 'Although it is a major Knowledge Base, it is simple enough to be accessed by people who are not computer scientists, who can then contribute and run queries on issues such the most popular standards.'

Professor Wendy Hall of ECS opened the academic year at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Her lecture marked the inauguration of the UAB Year of Computing.

Professor Hall's inaugural lecture was entitled 'Towards a Science of the Web'. Professor Hall is one of the founder directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other directors are Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner.

Professor Hall was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007. She is currently Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology and a member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council.She has published over 350 papers on subjects including hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries and web technologies.

Her lecture is available to view online.

Seventy A-level students from schools and colleges around Southampton visited the University to begin planning for the Student Robotics Competition.

The Competition is being organized by a group of University of Southampton students, many of who are in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. At an event held in the University last week the A-level students came to terms with the reality of what they will be taking part in over the next six months.

Their task will be to design and build a robot that will be able to perform a number of tasks and to see it perform in a grand final against all the other robots. The building and design will include a whole range of skills, and the A-level students will be supported throughout by a University student mentor who will visit them every week.

The first event of the competition gave the A-level students, from schols and colleges in Southampton, Fareham, Brockenhurst and Totton, an opportunity to build a simple machine using cardboard and string, and then in a series of presentations they heard exactly how they will approach the task.

The Competition is sponsored by the Motorola Foundation, the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and the Southampton University Students' Union.

On a Dr Who weekend camp in the New Forest, the 1st Southampton North Brownies were able to build a Tardis with the aid of ECS sonic screwdrivers.

The 'sonic screwdrivers' were made for the Brownies by Dr Matt Swabey, whose wife Claire Swabey is Assistant Leader of the Brownie pack.

'The sonic screwdrivers were cool!,said one of the Brownies. 'They were the best thing at Brownie Camp! We had a great time playing with them.'

Hugh Glaser, Reader in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Award 2007 in recognition of his exceptional contribution to diversity issues across the University.

Hugh has been involved in the University’s equal opportunities and diversity strategies over the last 15 years, and was one of the first harassment contacts. Throughout this time he has served on the committees that have taken forward this important agenda across the University, and is currently a Diversity Trainer, helping to ensure that members of the University staff are aware of diversity issues that arise in the work context.

‘I am grateful to have been supported in this work by the School of Electronics and Computer Science,’ said Hugh. ‘I believe it’s vital that as an institution we create a climate which enables everyone to operate to the best of their potential. This is increasingly important as we welcome growing numbers of students and staff from different backgrounds, different cultures, and from many different countries.’