Sixteen ECS Researchers and PhD students raised £700 for Action against Hunger by taking part in the WADAC & AAIR 10K race in Winchester.

Despite the heat on the day and painfully steep hills of Winchester, everyone in the group finished the race and most of them completed it in less than an hour. Manuel Salvadores came in first from the group at an impressive 39 minutes.

The group, comprising a few seasoned runners and many new runners, trained since February for their race (led by Jenny Sorge and Noura Abbas). Everyone completed the run in about an hour and some even had enough energy to dash towards the finish line. Jenny Sorge, Noura Abbas and Nishadi De Silva won the Women's Business Team category.

The fundraising page for Action against Hunger is still available and all donations will be gratefully received. Action against Hunger works in over 40 countries to combat malnutrition and improve access to clean drinking water. All contributions, big and small, count; as little as £5, for instance, can feed 30 children in Malawi. In addition to the online fundraising page, the running team also organised a free cake stall in ECS to raise awareness about the run and the charity.

The ECS team members were: Jennifer Sorge, Noura Abbas, Ana Graca, Nishadi De Silva, Paulo Matos, Bene Rodriguez, Ross Horne, Manuel Salvadores, Rikki Prince, Dirk De Jager, Antonio Morgado, Ida Griffith, Luke Teacy, Ruben Stranders, and Yangang Wang. So, ECS has now truly caught the running bug and even more runners are signing up for the New Forest Half Marathon (September) wanting to run better and faster than before! Other races and relays in the South are also being looked at. ,Who says that computer scientists are geeks that never look away from their computer screens? We think not!', they say!

ECS 2008 graduates received their degree results on Friday 20 June, the culmination of their BSc, BEng, or MEng programmes in the School.

Two hundred final-year students waited anxiously on Friday morning for the final degree results to be posted up in the School's Zepler Building. The students had taken either the three-year BSc or BEng programmes in ECS, or the four-year MEng programme, on one of the School's 23 different undergraduate programmes.

A range of emotions were visible with celebrations beginning almost immediately. The students will receive their degrees at graduation ceremonies on Friday 18 July. 'It is a significant achievement to have successfully completed an undergraduate degree in ECS,' said Head of School Professor Harvey Rutt. 'We are delighted to be able to congratulate our students on the result all the hard work that has gone into their studies here and look forward to seeing them and their families at the graduation ceremonies.'

One final-year MEng student, Sean Nuzum has enjoyed his time at Southampton so much that he's made a video about it. Sean has used his time as a student to the full, running the ECS student society, taking part in the University entrepreneurs society, Fish on Toast, and also making videos for the Students' Union. His contribution to the University is recorded here, and if you'd like to vote for him in the Real World Awards and vote by Monday 30 June.

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Final-year MEng students presented the results of their Individual Research Project to a School conference, just days before their results were announced.

The Individual Research Project forms a substantial part of the final-year of the Master of Engineering degree. Students spend time researching a subject of their choice before writing a report and producing a poster which they present at a one-day conference in the School, their final task as an ECS undergraduate student. This course unit allows students to demonstrate mastery of an advanced aspect of the discipline, including critical evaluation of current research and research methods, and an awareness of the current limits of knowledge in this aspect of the discipline.

As well as producing a research report, the students also have to give a three-minute presentation of their report to their colleagues and to the examiners, as well as producing a poster. The conference was followed by lunch and the chance to look at the posters, as well as a very well-earned glass of champagne at the end of the final degree exams.

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It was announced by the University last week (18 June) that Darren Bagnall and Michael Kraft have been awarded Professorships in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Both Professor Bagnall and Professor Kraft are members of the ECS Nano Group and will be moving with their research teams into the new Mountbatten Building when it opens later this year. Both are looking forward to the new opportunities that the Building will bring.

Darren Bagnall said: ‘The new cleanroom will contain such a fantastic array of equipment that it will be amongst the very best nanofabrication facilities in the world. We will be able to deposit single layers of atoms and will have lithographic capability that will allow us to fabricate truly nanoscale devices and systems. Our capability in microscopy alone will be staggering, we will have scanning electron microscopes, atomic force microscopes and even a scanning helium ion microscope that will collectively allow us to visualise, understand and manipulate nanotechnology to create new electronic devices.

‘In my own research I am particularly excited about how the new cleanroom will allow us to investigate the use of nanotechnology as a route to cheap solar energy. We will use biomimetic surfaces, plasmonics and self-organised semiconductor nanowires to make entirely new types of solar cell. By growing solar cells like nanoscale forests we will be able to make solar energy so cheap that we will one day be amazed that people used coal, oil and uranium to make electricity.’

Michael Kraft said: ‘The new fab will allow me to develop and fabricate the most advanced micro and nanosystems, integrating sensors, actuators and interface electronics. We will be exploring new designs, materials and visionary ideas to make Atom Chips portable and transport them from lab curiosities to real-world applications.

‘We’ll work on levitating micro and nano-objects for inertial sensing applications, linear particle accelerators (aka MEMS guns) and RF applications. They all need sophisticated control and interface electronics to integrate them as a tightly integrated system on chip and the new building is going to give us a range of advantages as we take forward this exciting research.’

An ECS researcher has been awarded funding of £300,000 to improve the safety and usability of automatically generated software code commonly used in the space and automotive industries.

Dr Bernd Fischer of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop systematic techniques and supporting tools that will allow application developers to customise automatically generated code efficiently and reliably without needing to modify either the code generator or the generated code.

According to Dr Fischer, who has spent much of his career at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which is one of the collaborators on this project, software developers generally rely on code generation as a key technology to translate high-level models into code. Although this speeds up development and increases productivity and reliability, the output code often differs from the user's exact requirements and thus needs customisation.

Over a three-year period, Dr Fischer proposes to develop a domain-specific code generator with the capacity to support reliable code customisation.

'This research is about making changes to the output of code generators,' said Dr Fischer. 'It's about making the code generator more flexible without having to go into the inner guts of the machine. Users in safety-critical application domains such as automotive and avionics systems will particularly benefit from the assurance support we can provide for customisations.'

We look forward to welcoming prospective students to the School on Open Day 2009 on Friday 3 July.

We will be running different tours for each degree stream - Computer Science, Electronics, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering, and Information Technology in Organisations - as well as a session for parents and teachers. You can book a place on one of these tours on the University Open Day Web Site.

The four parallel tours will run concurrently four times during the day (starting at 10 am, 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm). You can of course book to go on more than one tour.

You will have the opportunity to hear about the content of our degree programmes, to see our labs and study facilities, and to meet some of our students and lecturers. The Open Day is a really useful opportunity to gauge the atmosphere of the School and University and to help you decide what kind of course you want to undertake. The University runs tours of many of the student facilities on campus, as well as some of the halls of residence.

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If you are unable to come to this event, there will also be Open Days held later in the year, on 5 and 6 September.

Two final-year MEng students at ECS have predicted that by 2014 solar cell electricity generation will be cheaper than conventional fossil fuel methods.

Sean Nuzum and Tim Davey, who both studied for the MEng in Electronic Engineering at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), based their final year projects on solar energy. Their work was supervised by Professor Darren Bagnall of the ECS Nano research group.

In a research project entitled 'Solar technology: Emerging markets and global economic forecasting, when should you go solar?', Sean predicts that due to the rate at which gas and electricity prices are soaring, and the rate at which photovoltaics is decreasing, it will be cheaper to use solar cells by 2014.

In order to make these cells more efficient than electricity, Tim proposes using devices based on amorphous silicon and develops a case for this in his research project entitled 'High efficiency a-Si thin-film multi-junction solar cells for the commercial market'.

'Silicon is plentiful and much less toxic than other materials used to make thin film solar cells,' he says, 'and can be deposited as thin film and stacked in such a way as to trap light, which increases the cells' efficiency possibly resulting in a cell which is 12 per cent efficient.’

Both researchers believe that it is time for consumers to think seriously about installing solar panels.

Sean believes that the most common argument against using them is the initial capital outlay needed. He said: 'The average system today in 2008 costs approximately £3,000 including grants, with a payback time of just six years, and this period will reduce significantly over the coming decade.

'The future is certainly bright for the photovoltaics industry and the time is right to go solar.'

As news of Tiger Woods' knee injury hits the headlines, an MEng student in ECS has developed a new self-powered sensor to monitor progress during knee operations.

As part of his final year project in his Masters degree in Electromechanical Engineering, which he studied at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Fauzan Baharudin explored the potential for the use of thick film technology in the development of medical sensors which could be embedded in the knee during surgery.

This new sensor, called Serial In-vivo Transducer (SIT), which uses thick film technology, could measure tendon force during Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) reconstruction.

The ACL is the most commonly injured ligament and is commonly damaged by athletes, in fact it is reported that this is the ligament associated with Tiger Woods’ injury.

Fauzan’s project was supervised by Professor Neil White at ECS, who, in 1991 developed thick film piezoelectric material which made it possible to produce a sensor which could power itself if it were installed in a device that vibrates and would be ideal for appliances where physical connections to the outside world were difficult. Professor White said: ‘Although this work is still in its infancy, our earlier research in thick-film sensors has shown that it is feasible to apply the technology to medical applications such as prosthetic hands. We have also shown that it is possible to harvest energy from the human body using piezoelectric materials and the knee is subjected to very high levels of force during everyday activities. It therefore seems logical to combine the two approaches to deliver a new type of embedded, self-powered sensor.

In Fauzan’s project entitled 'Assessing the use of thick-film technology in knee surgery: along with energy harvesting in-vivo', he has also incorporated some of this energy harvesting capability into SIT which means that it will be self-powered.

'I chose knee surgery because this has been very little research carried out in this field and I felt a self-powered device could work well in the knee,' he said.

Before developing SIT, Fauzan reviewed the existing devices in this field and concluded that due to its flexibility in fabrication, low capital cost, fast lead time and its suitability for use in the body, thick film technology is the best solution for ACL surgery. Assessment of the energy harvesting feature revealed that the device could produce more than enough energy to power itself.

'It remains a mystery to me, given how common knee injuries are among athletes, that devices like ours have not been developed before now,' said Fauzan. 'A sensible assumption for this is that thick film technology does not reach medical researchers as quickly as it does within the microelectronics community hence the delay in realising the huge potential in developing in vivo transducers.'

ECS engineers are developing the world’s smallest, high-performance and low-power sensor in silicon which will have applications in biosensing and environmental monitoring.

Professor Hiroshi Mizuta and his team at ECS are part of the three year European FP7-funded NEMSIC (Nano-electro-mechanical-system-integrated-circuits) project which will make these devices possible.

As well as being the smallest sensor on the market to date, it will have extreme sensitivity and very low power consumption. It will achieve this by co-integrating single-electron transistors (SETs) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) on a common silicon technology platform.

‘Power consumption is a big issue at the moment as devices use current whether they are switched off and on,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The single-electron transistor combined with the NEM device technology reduces power consumption at both ON and OFF states of the sensor. Stand-by power is reduced to zero by having a complete sleep with the NEM switch when it is off.’

Professor Mizuta and his team will develop the single-electron transistor with a unique suspended silicon nanobridge which will work as an extremely sensitive detector for biological and chemical molecules. ‘This is the first time that anyone has combined these two nanotechnologies to develop a smart sensor,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The traditional CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) approach has many limitations so we needed to find a new approach.’

The sensing devices will need to be made to the nanoscale, which will be made possible by the new electron beam lithography machine which will be available in the new ECS Mountbatten building when it opens in a few months.

‘This sensor will be the smallest and use less power than any other on the market,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The fact that it will be at the nanoscale means that it will be able to detect either single-charge transfer and/or change in masses caused by a small amount of chemical and biological molecules electrically’.

NEMSIC is headed by Professor Adrian Ionescu of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and other partners are: Delft University of Technology, Stitching IMEC Nederland, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique – Laboratoire d’Electronique de la Technologie de l’Information, SCIPROM Sarl, Interuniversity Micro-electronics Center, Honeywell Romania SRL – Sensors Laboratory Bucharest, Université de Genève.

A paper by three members of the ECS Learning Societies Lab won the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies in Spain last week.

The paper which won the award was authored by Asma Ounas, Hugh Davis and David Millard and entitled 'A Framework for Semantic Group Formation'. The award was announced and presented at IEEE ICALT 2008 held in Santander, Spain.

Fifteen members of LSL attended the conference, presenting two full papers, five short papers, and three posters, as well as participating in other conference activities and being represented on the Programme Committee by Su White.