As scientists get closer to engineering new forms of life in test tubes, the University of Southampton is set to host an international conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI).

The Artificial Life XI conference, which will be held in Europe for the first time ever this August, will be hosted by the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science’s (ECS).

‘It is a great honour for us to host this event which celebrates its 21st anniversary this year,’ said Dr Seth Bullock from SENSe, one of the conference organisers. ‘The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it first started out in the late 80s.’

The newly-formed SENSe group, one of the leading Alife groups in the UK and Europe, is already exploring the use of biological organisation in managing large-scale computing systems and has also developed a new type of biochip encapsulating a slime mould cell.

ALIFE XI will provide an opportunity for biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, social scientists and technologists to get together to exchange ideas and results.

Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, the inventor with Manfred Eigen, of the quasi-species model and the hypercycle concept, Professor Eva Jablonka, author of Evolution in Four Dimensions (with Marion Lamb), and Professor Andrew Ellington, a leading pioneer in the new science of synthetic biology. Topics such as artificial cells, simulating massive biological networks, exploiting biological substrates for computation and control, and deploying bio-inspired engineering, will all be addressed.

‘Our challenge is to understand the organisation of living systems via a combination of simulating existing life and building new life,’ said Dr Bullock. ‘Until recently, the term “artificial lifeâ€? referred almost exclusively to computer programs, or maybe robots, but the progress being made by synthetic biologists building real cells out of real biological material means that the field is on the cusp of a major step forward, and that this conference has the potential to be a real breakthrough event’.

Eric Cooke holds a unique role in the School as its first Senior Tutor. Find out more about his background, his role in the School, and his route to Computer Science in his academic profile.

Eric sees himself as an advocate for ECS students, and his role encompasses dealing with student problems and issues as well as teaching courses on the Computer Science degreee programme. He has also contributed to the University's international recruitment activities, and willingly travels around the world, promoting the values of a Southampton education.

The first ECS Careers Fair was attended by 1000 students seeking graduate jobs and summer placements from 33 diverse companies.

The students were able to find out more about career and placement opportunities with an impressive range of blue-chip and high-tech companies, including many local companies.

The Fair took place on Tuesday 12 February on the Highfield Campus, and is the first targetted-ECS event to have been held in the University. The enthusiastic response from both companies and students means that it will be held again next year.

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Many of the company representatives were ECS graduates, now working for companies such as Ernst & Young, Roke Manor Research, Selex Comms and IT Innovation. Among the most popular stands was the CV Clinic organized by FactSet. As well as the exhibition stands a number of companies gave short presentations. For further information about how ECS is keen to work with companies, see our Business pages.

A contingent of students from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou visited the School of Electronics and Computer Science as part of a UK tour.

The students, who were aged 16 and 17, were on a study visit to find out more about UK higher education. They were given a tour of the School of Electronics and Computer Science by Senior Tutor, Eric Cooke, which included the School's undergraduate computing lab.

Dr Neil Ross of ECS was part of the STORM project team which designed and developed a flight instrument now in orbit on the space shuttle Atlantis.

The Southampton Transient Oxygen and Radiation Monitor (STORM) instrument was on board Atlantis when it was launched earlier this week from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, destined for the International Space Station. STORM will be used in an experiment called MEDET (Materials Exposure and Degradation Experiment on EuTEF), which aims to measure how the hostile space environment affects materials used to construct spacecraft.

These materials, particularly polymers which are often used to form insulation blankets on spacecraft, for example, suffer damage from the combined effects of solar radiation, micrometeroid and space debris impact, and from exposure to atomic oxygen, which is the primary constituent of the Earth's residual atmosphere in low Earth orbit. STORM will monitor the concentration of atomic oxygen (AO) and the flux of solar X-ray and ultra-violet radiation.

Once operational, STORM will send back data at regular intervals so that the changes in the AO and X-ray/UV levels can be monitored over time. After two or three years of exposure to the space environment, the experiment will be returned to Earth for analysis and interpretation by the Southampton researchers, who will determine the effect of the exposure on the materials and instruments contained on board.

Design work on the instrument, which is a cube measuring approximately 15 centimetres on each side with a mass of approximately 1 kilogram, began in 2001 with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

STORM was developed by staff from three School of Engineering Sciences research groups, including Professor Stephen Gabriel from Astronautics; Dr Graham Roberts from Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics and Dr Alan Chambers from Engineering Materials, together with Dr Neil Ross from the School of Electronics and Computer Science. Ken Lawson and Dr Jeff Rao of the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University were also involved in the fabrication of some of the sensors.

Most of the design and development work was carried out by two Engineering Sciences research students, Duncan Goulty and Carl White, both of whom have now been awarded their PhDs. Several undergraduate students also took part in the development of STORM by carrying out project work as part of their studies.

The MEDET experiment is part of an international project between the University of Southampton's Schools of Engineering Sciences and Electronics and Computer Science; the European Space Agency (ESA); the French Space Agency (CNES), and the French Aerospace Laboratory (ONERA).

The NASA image shows the experimental package in the shuttle's cargo bay. STORM is just visible on the lower left of the picture.MEDET is the box wrapped in a gold coloured insulation material. Our package, STORM can be seen as a small aluminium coloured rectangle sticking through the wrapping material. Just visible are four of the UV radiation detectors (small round holes) and a rectangular Xray window covering two of the four Xray detectors.

Professor Michael Butler of ECS is involved in the £13.4 million EU DEPLOY project which is aiming to create new ways of building resilient computer systems.

With today’s increasingly complex computer systems which are often susceptible to malicious attacks, it is becoming important to build in resilience from the outset, rather than simply ‘adding it on’ at a later date.

The DEPLOY project will work across five of the most important sectors in industry today – transportation, automotive, space, telecommunications and business information – to create new ways of building resilient computer systems.

Professor Michael Butler comments: ‘What is encouraging about this project is that our industry partners are really enthusiastic and have recognised the importance of incorporating robust design into their computer systems. We are using mathematical models to provide analysis of these designs, which will help eliminate errors before the systems are put together.’

Scientists from the University of Southampton will work alongside academic partners from Newcastle University, University of Dusseldorf, ETH (Zurich) and Aabo Academy (Finland) and five leading European companies – Siemens, Bosch, Space Systems, Nokia and SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing).

Work being carried out will feed into projects such as the 2013 European Space Agency’s mission to explore Mercury and train security on the Paris Metro. The scientists will be using formal engineering methods to analyse the resilience of each system and refining these in an industrial setting to ensure they meet the needs of an increasingly technological society.

A pilot will be set up in each different industry sector, which will be tested and developed for a year before going into production.

Dr Darren Bagnall of ECS is talking about his plans to make solar energy a reality on BBC Radio 4's Material World (Thursday 21 February).

Dr Bagnall predicted last year that solar energy would become a truly cost-competitive energy by 2025, and he has been invited on the programme, along with Dr Ken Durose from Durham University, to discuss his plans to make this prediction a reality.

He will describe how he believes that large numbers of self-organised 'nanodevices' integrated within large areas, such as roofs, are likely to reach efficiencies in the 10-20 per cent range.

'The idea is to make solar energy work across large expanses,' he said. 'If we covered every roof with billions of tiny nanodevices, we could harness the energy we need.'

According to Dr Bagnall, the new Mountbatten Building currently under construction at the University will host a new state-of-the-art toolset including high-resolution electron beam direct-write, optical lithography to make his plans feasible.

With funding from the EPSRC-funded 'Supergen - photovoltaics for the 21st century', over the past four years, photovoltaics has become Dr Bagnall's most important research activity. His overall aim is to improve photovoltaics by the application of nanotechnology

Material World is on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 21 February at 16.30.

Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Alex Rogers demonstrated decentralised systems developed for BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and Qinetiq at a conference in London this week.

Over the last five years Professor Jennings and Dr Rogers have worked with the University of Oxford to address data fusion in industry as part of the ARGUS II project. They have developed air traffic control systems which do not need a controller for BAE and decentralised engine service scheduling for airplanes and cars around the world for Rolls Royce.

'We set out to build decentralised systems which did not need any centralised controller,' said Dr Rogers. 'The advantage of this approach is that we could develop more robust systems which could behave autonomously with minimal human intervention.�

The ARGUS project, which won The Engineer Technology and Innovation Award for Large Company and University Collaboration, combines two technologies for the first time.

The Southampton team, led by Professor Jennings, is concerned with ‘agents’, computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of the humans that they represent.

‘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 probable outcomes of any particular action.

Working together the teams have developed software that allows agents to communicate with each other to solve complex problems involving uncertainty.

The conference in London marked the end of ARGUS II and Oxford and Southampton 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 autonomous agents and Bayesian techniques for reasoning under uncertainty into areas where resources are limited and continually shifting. For more information go to www.argusiiproject.org/

ECS is again this year contributing a range of popular activities to the University’s programme of events for National Science and Engineering Week.

The School will be offering a variety of activities at the University’s Science and Engineering Day, taking place on Saturday 8 March from 10.30 am to 4 pm in the Garden Court exhibition space at the Highfield Campus.

This event is specially designed for families and children of all ages. There will be fascinating demonstrations, exhibitions, and interactive displays and talks centering around six different themes: Space, Transport, Life, Light, Chemistry, and Technology.

ECS activities include: Madlab kit construction, where real electronic devices can be built; programming using Scratch, and Enhanced reality where you can design your own 3D object and take your software home.

Other activities include building a radio, including soldering the parts together, and testing that it works before taking it home; programming and operating a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in our Robotics arena, and making your own computer games and taking them home.

In addition to this the School is also sponsoring a lecture jointly with the British Computer Society, for local sixth formers. Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BCS by tracing the history of computation and looking forward to the future in ‘The Best is Yet to Come’, on Wednesday 12 March at 2 pm in the lecture theatre of Building 32. All are welcome to attend.

The City of Southampton played a starring and often inspirational role in the first Photography Competition organized in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The competition attracted 250 entries from staff and students in the School, submitting work in four categories: Southampton, the Highfield Campus, ECS research and project work, and life in ECS.

The quality of photographs was extremely high and the subject-matter surprisingly varied. Students had gone to a lot of trouble to get exactly the right angle and lighting, and, since many of the students were international students, they were approaching the City and the Campus with a ‘fresh eye’. The docks were a favourite subject, as was the Itchen River and the Common. Autumn colours on the Highfield Campus made for some stunning images, and some of the University’s architectural strengths also proved popular. Student life provided some of the most amusing images: students on a Unilink bus in fancy dress, Christmas parties, and diversions in the labs were among some of the subjects chosen.

The competition was judged by photographer Russell Sach, who awarded five prizes and commendations in each of the four categories, with special prizes also awarded to the best photographs from a first-year student and an MSc student.

Many of the photographs have already appeared in the School’s brochures and marketing publications. This image of 'Freedom of the Seas' was taken by Dr Jessie Hey.