BT has announced that it is to become a sponsor of the Web Science Research Initiative, founded by the ECS professors Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with Daniel J. Weitzner.
By attracting talented young people worldwide to study the economics, psychology, technology and sociology of the Web, WSRI aims to bring the study of Web Science into mainstream education. The initiative, which is jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and ECS at the University of Southampton, will bring together leading experts in the world of computer science and communications to create the curriculum for a new generation of Web scientists.
Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT, said: 'In the economy of the future, a nation's skills will form its critical competitive edge. By moving beyond the traditional fields of Computer Science and IT, the Web Science Research Initiative will equip young people with the skills to thrive in a world in which everyone is connected.'
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Professor at both MIT and Southampton said: 'I'm very happy that BT is imagining with us the incredible possibilities which exist in the future for humanity interconnected through the Web. An important role for our founding sponsors will be to help us develop new Web Science curricula to ensure that we are training future generations of web scientists to meet the needs of industry.'
WSRI will examine all areas of human interaction with the Web, from the social impact that has resulted from the growth of Web access to the potential of new technologies to expand the World Wide Web's boundaries and drive the social interactions of an increasingly interconnected world.
A new tool which makes it possible to extract information about an individual's health from genotypes in a fraction of a second, has been developed by an ECS academic.
In a paper entitled Boosting Haplotype Inference with Local Search, just published in Constraints: An International Journal, Professor Joao Marques-Silva, of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, describes with collaborators a new approach to the process of inferring haplotype information from genotype data.
A haplotype can be defined as a group of alleles of one or more genes on a single chromosome that are closely enough linked to be inherited usually as a unit and a genotype refers to the combination of alleles inherited from both parents.
According to Professor Marques-Silva, the current method of extracting haplotypes from genotype data is based on statistical approaches, which can take a long time to compute.
Professor Marques-Silva and collaborators approached this scenario by taking the Haplotype Inference by Pure Parsimony (HIPP), a solution that minimises the total number of distinct haplotypes used, and developed new algorithms which they applied to achieve faster results.
'Biologists have been using these statistical approaches for a long time and may not be open to change,' he said. 'However, these methods can take days, even months to terminate, whereas our approach produces an almost instant result.'
Further research is being carried out currently by Professor Marques-Silva and collaborators to validate this new method and to prove that it could replace statistical methods in a number of settings.
'This is the biggest development that we have made in this field so far,' said Professor Marques-Silva. 'It remains to be seen whether biologists will use this instead of existing techniques.'
Today's Web will be seen as 'just the tip of the iceberg' compared to the potential power of the Semantic Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ECS professor and WSRI founder, told the BBC Today programme.
Speaking to the Today programme on Wednesday 9 July, Sir Tim said: 'In the short term the possibilities of the Semantic Web won't be visible to the casual Web user,' he said, 'but as we start to write programmes that can access, share, and reuse data, we'll end up by making a very powerful system which when we look back we'll say that the original Web of data was just the tip of the iceberg.'
He continued: 'At the moment the data out there isn't in a form that we can process and use, so we're not using it powerfully enough.'
Drawing attention to the establishment of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term partnership between ECS at Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sir Tim advocated the need for further study of the Web by creative people from many disciplines.
Dr Richard Watson of ECS will explore the field of artificial life at the University's next Science Cafe event on Thursday 17 July.
Dr Watson will consider the area of artificial life which studies the evolution of artificial creature in computer models, and compare these simulations with our current understanding of evolution. His talk 'What we still don't know about evolution' will be followed by a question-and-answer session and an informal discussion of the issues.
The event takes place from 7pm to 8.45pm on Thursday 17 July at the Soul Cellar, 78 West Marlands Road, Southampton.
Richard comments: 'I will show some examples of artificial evolution simulations and artificial life creatures, and also illustrate current shortcomings in our understanding of how evolution works.
'I will also talk about the kind of mechanisms that my team in ECS has been working on to develop a more complete theory of evolution.'
Dr Watson is part of the ECS SENSe group (Science and Engineering of Natural Systems) which is next month hosting the first Artificial Life conference to be held in Europe. The event takes place in Winchester between 5 and 8 August.
Around 250 ECS students will graduate at ceremonies being held at the Highfield Campus on Friday 18 July.
Students and their families will be coming from around the world to attend the graduation ceremonies and the ECS graduation receptions. The degrees to be awarded are BEng, BSc, MEng, MSc and PhD, in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology in Organisations, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering.
Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, will be officiating at the ceremonies for the first time. He will tell the new graduates: 'In the standards you have set in your coursework and project work, your attendance at School events of all kinds, and your willingness to give up time to extend the Schoolâs reputation in the University and among the local community, you have contributed to making ECS the distinctive and dynamic place that has shaped and will continue to shape generations of students.'
Degrees in Computer Science and ITO will be awarded in the morning ceremony at 9.30 in the Turner Sims Concert Hall. The reception afterwards will take place in The Piazza. Degrees in Electronic, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering will be awarded in the afternoon ceremony at 4.45 in the Turner Sims, with the reception afterwards in The Garden Court.
A series of lectures on superconductivity produced by the University of Cambridge includes a contribution by ECS Professor Jan Sykulski.
The lectures are available on video online and have been produced to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of superconductivity in 2011. They provide an introduction to the fundamental characteristics and theories of superconductivity. The BCS and Ginzburg-Landau theories are discussed for conventional superconductors, and more recent developments including theories of high temperature superconductivity are introduced. The critical parameters, flux pinning behaviour and characterisation techniques are also covered.
Professor Sykulski's contribution is based on the electrotechnology of motors and generators.
This year's International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI) will be held in Europe for the first time ever from 5 to 8 August.
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is to host the event, which will take place at the West Downs Campus in Winchester, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
`This is a critical time for Artificial Life,' said Dr Seth Bullock of ECS, the conference chair. `The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s.'
This year's conference has switched to a multi-track format, which has enabled almost 150 extra presentations. It has attracted hundreds of biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, social scientists and technologists from around the world, who will be hearing some of the latest research findings from areas such as artificial cells, the simulation of massive biological networks and exploiting biological phenomena such as slime moulds for computation and control.
Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, editor-in-chief of the journal Complexity, 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.
Professor Takashi Ikegami from the University of Tokyo will open the conference, speaking on work spanning self-organisation and autopoiesis in systems of birds, robots, children, flies, cells, and even oil droplets. The conference is unified by a focus on understanding the fundamental behavioural dynamics of embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.
'Alife is continuing to put new ideas into the common consciousness of scientists,' said Dr Bullock. 'It acts as a melting pot for rarefied specialist fields to come together to talk and learn from each other. This type of interdisciplinary exchange is critical to the development of scientists equipped for current challenges in understanding and managing complex adaptive systems such as ecologies, climate, the economy and the web. We at ECS are addressing this need through the development of new post-graduate training programmes and the creation of a new Chair in Biological Computing. Iâm sure that hosting ALIFE XI at this stage will be a real shot in the arm for UK Alife research.'
One of the conference presentations will describe a new program for automatically identifying spam emails that is inspired by the human immune system; another uses the techniques of artificial life to model the development of consciousness as a by-product of the way that various modules of the brain needed to communicate with each other. An experiment with robots will also be described in which they self-assemble into larger, more complex forms, where the individual units assigned roles to themselves dynamically without recourse to a top-level plan or blueprint.
The worldâs least expensive robots will also be demonstrated during the conference; constructed by undergraduate engineering students at the University of Southampton, the tiny robots learn from each other and work together as a swarm.
A series of press events will be hosted during ALIFE XI. Further details will be available early next week.
The ECS Learning Societies Lab has produced an innovative interactive video for undergraduate civil engineering students undertaking traffic surveys.
The video was produced in collaboration with the University's School of Civil Engineering and the Environment and the School of Psychology; team members on the project were Dr Tom Cherrett, Sarah Maynard, Dr Gary Wills, Dr Joe Price, and Dr Itiel Dror. The aim was to produce an interactive video for undergraduate civil engineering students showing the risks associated with filming traffic on a busy urban road. The video was filmed from the perspective of how not to undertake the fieldwork and was based on a well practised technique that employed for registration plate capture surveys over a number of years.
Once filming had been completed, a system was created to allow students to interact with the video by clicking on elements which they deemed to be a hazard and then ask them to explain the reasons why. A facility to store the student input was developed to allow the lecturer to view all the data allowing for customised feedback to each student.
The video was demonstrated to the EUNIS 2008 conference Aarhus, Denmark, last month, where it won second prize in the Dorup E-Learning Award. The LSL conference paper was entitled: 'Risk Assessment Education: Utilising Interactive Video for Teaching Health and Safety'.
Research into new types of solar cells produced by nanotechnology was described by Professor Darren Bagnall at the World Renewable Energy Conference in Glasgow.
Professor Bagnall and his Nano Group at School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) have conducted extensive research into how nanotechnologies can contribute to the creation of solar cells which can be manufactured on cheap flexible substrates rather than expensive silicon wafers by using nanoscale features that trap light.
Speaking in the conference session on Photovoltaic Technology, Professor Bagnall delivered a presentation entitled: Biomimetics and plasmonics: capturing all of the light. He described how his group has investigated biomimetic optical structures, which copy the nano structures seen in nature so that they can develop solar cells which allow efficient light-trapping. One type of structure is based on an anti-reflective technique exploited by moth eyes. Others are based on metallic nanoparticles that form plasmonic structures.
'It is essential that a solar cell absorbs all of the light that is available,' he said. 'Thicker devices absorb more light and unfortunately the need to use thick layers (particularly in the case of silicon) drives up the cost and often degrades the electronic properties of devices. Effective light-trapping will allow many alternatives and systems to be considered and will allow lower quality (cheaper) material.â
A new way to regulate the extent to which artificial agents rely on social learning will be discussed at the first European conference on Artificial Life, hosted by ECS next month.
Dieter Vanderelst, Rene Ahn and Emilia Barakova from Eindhoven University of Technology will present a paper entitled Simulated Trust: Towards robust social learning on Tuesday 5 August. They will describe how they have developed a mechanism which makes it possible for artificial agents to regulate their reliance on social learning.
According to the researchers, although social learning is a potentially powerful learning mechanism to use in artificial multi-agent systems, findings in the animal kingdom show that it is also possibly detrimental as it could lead to agents acting on second-hand information that might not be trustworthy.
The researchers' simulations have shown that this new proposed trust mechanism is effective in regulating the extent to which agents rely on social learning and causes considerable improvements in their learning rate. (A copy of the paper is available from Joyce Lewis at: j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is hosting this year's conference, which will take place at the University of Winchester West Downs Campus, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
"This is a critical time for Artificial Life," said Dr Seth Bullock at ECS, the conference chair. "The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s."
Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, editor-in-chief of the journal Complexity, 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.
Professor Takashi Ikegami from the University of Tokyo will open the conference, speaking on work spanning self-organisation and autopoiesis in systems of birds, robots, children, flies, cells, and even oil droplets. The conference is unified by a focus on understanding the fundamental behavioural dynamics of embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.