For the second year running an ECS dissertation on computerised agents has won the BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition, indicating that agents are becoming a reality.

It is also the second year in a row that a researcher from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has won this annual award, which is presented by the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with the British Computer Society (BCS).

This year's winner, Dr Talal Rahwan from ECS, has developed new algorithms to enable greater co-operation between agents.

He calls this interaction 'coalition formation' which allows autonomous agents to group and co-ordinate their activities efficiently so that they achieve their individual or collective goals.

‘Forming effective coalitions is a major research challenge in the field of multi-agent systems,’ said Dr Rahwan. ‘Central to this endeavour is the problem of determining which of the possible coalitions to form in order to achieve the goals of the system. Our algorithms significantly outperform previous ones in terms of execution time, solutions quality, and memory requirements.’

Last year's winner, Dr Rajdeep Dash also from ECS, examined the role of agents in the way auctions are used to manage supply chains.

Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group at ECS, who supervised both dissertations, said: ‘The fact that dissertations on autonomous agent-based systems have won the British Computer Distinguished Dissertation Competition two years running is firm evidence that our agents are leaving the laboratory and are ready to be used in industry. We are now moving towards practical devices that support the effective co-ordination and formation of teams of first responders in major disaster response scenarios.’

An example of where agents are being developed for use in disaster management scenarios is the ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) project (http://www.aladdinproject.org/) which is now well under way and in which ECS is a partner.

The dissertation award selects the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science and publishes the winning dissertation and runner up submission on the BCS website. The prize winner will receive his award at the 2008 BCS Roger Needham Lecture, at the Royal Society in London, on 12th November.

The Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory has launched a new website which emphasizes both the breadth of its research and its commercial testing capabilities.

The Laboratory combines a wide range of academic research projects in the area of solid and liquid dielectrics, with a repertoire of commercial testing and similar services for the electrical power industry.

The new website is designed to provide information about the growing number of research projects taking place within the Laboratory and to make it easier for prospective postgraduate students and interested commercial parties to find relevant information and contact details.

The Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory is an integral part of the Electrical Power Engineering research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and represents an excellent example of the synergy that is possible between academic research and commercially driven development.

Around 350 new students arrive in ECS this week to join undergraduate and MSc programmes and to take part in the ECS JumpStart programme.

The ECS JumpStart programme is intended to introduce students to the School of Electronics and Computer Science, to the University Campus and the City of Southampton, and to their new fellow students. It involves a mix of meetings, challenges, and social events and allows students to find out enough about the School to enable them to settle better into the routine of lectures and classes.

JumpStart is sponsored by IBM. It is being run this year by Teresa Binks, a second-year student in Computer Science, and Sean Nuzum, who graduated from ECS this summer with an MEng degree in Electronic Engineering. Around 50 current undergraduate students are also involved in acting as student mentors throughout the week.

'We're delighted to welcome so many high achieving students to the School,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of ECS. 'They join the School at a particularly exciting time, with the new Mountbatten Building almost completed, and a whole new range of opportunities likely to emerge during their time here.'

The University semester begins next Monday, 6 October.

ECS graduate and Professor, David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, has won the 2008 Marconi Society Prize and Fellowship.

Professor David Payne is an internationally-distinguished photonics researcher and fibre optic pioneer, who was selected for this year's Prize for his pioneering work in the field of fibre optoelectronics and fibre telecommunications, the backbone of modern high speed data transmission.

He received the $100,000 prize at a special annual awards dinner held at the Royal Society on Friday 26 September. Of the many and major advances developed by Payne's research group, the best known is the invention of the erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA), a type of optical amplifier on which rests the whole basis of our fibre telecommunications systems. This unique invention overcame the problem of transmitting data over large distances, a process which even when using highly transparent fibre, requires some degree of amplification.

Payne, 63, was born in England, but brought up in Africa, and returned to England to attend university. He earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical power engineering at the University of Southampton in 1967 and became that institution's first graduate student in the new optoelectronics research program. His work helped establish the Optoelectronics Research Centre as one of the leading fibre optic research facilities in the world and he joined the faculty as a professor of photonics, a position he has held for 40 years. He became Director of the ORC in 1995.

Says Payne: "I was incredibly fortunate to be offered the opportunity to work as one of the first in optical telecommunications. It created the high-speed connected world and its outstanding success has been one of man's greatest achievements. Without optical fibres and amplifiers it is hard to imagine the internet we know today."

Among the numerous awards and honours Payne has received are the top American, European and Japanese prizes in photonics. He has been honoured with the UK Rank Prize for Optics, the IEEE Photonics Award (the first awarded outside the USA) and more recently he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences as one of only 240 foreign members. Earlier this year, he also received the Millennium Prize.

Payne, a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, lives with his wife Vanessa in Hamble, Southampton.

Professor Wendy Hall, in her role as President of the Association for Computing Machinery, will address the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Colorado this week.

A number of leading women from industry and academic life will take part in the conference to illuminate the significant role that women play in creating and utilizing technology to improve world conditions.

Wendy Hall will be participating in a panel on European Women in Science and Engineering on Friday 3 October, as well as a session on ACM's Membership Gender Study and how to meet the dynamic needs of women in computing.

Professor Hall took over as President of the ACM earlier this year, the first person from outside North America to be elected President. ACM is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women is being held in Keystone, Colorado, from 1 to 4 October.

A new algorithm developed by ECS researcher Dr Edith Elkind can be used to predict political power balances.

In a paper entitled: 'Manipulating the Quota in Weighted Voting Games' published in the Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference, Dr Elkind and her co-authors describe how a mathematical model developed to describe voting in a parliament can facilitate decision-making among groups of computerised agents.

'Agents tend to form coalitions in much the same way as political parties,' she said. 'So I thought it would be interesting to look at what would happen to the balance of power if you change the number of votes needed to make a decision.'

In the paper, Dr Elkind, who is part of ECS’s Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, illustrates that the power of a political party is very much dependent on whether bills are passed by a simple majority (50 per cent of all votes) or a qualified majority (two-thirds of all votes).

She believes that the same is true of autonomous agents, and that by applying the model to these scenarios, possible outcomes can be predicted.

'We can quantify the change in the balance of power caused by changing the voting threshold, like requiring a two-thirds majority to pass a bill rather than a 50 percent majority.'

ECS is celebrating a record year for student intake on undergraduate and MSc courses, with 446 students enrolled at the end of Freshers' Week.

This year 275 students are enrolled on our 23 undergraduate programmes, and 171 students enrolled on our nine MSc programmes. 'This is a great endorsement for our determination to provide high-quality education within a world-leading research school,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School.

'We are continually assessing our programme syllabuses to ensure that our courses meet the needs of future graduates, as well as the needs of business and industry,' said Dr Andy Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies. 'It's really gratifying to see that our students are in such demand by global high technology companies, who really value the type of education and skills training that we are able to offer in ECS. Our undergraduate programmes also provide an excellent basis for further specialist research on PhD or Engineering Doctorate programmes.'

Over recent years the MSc programme at ECS has expanded significantly and now offers nine different courses. Professor Darren Bagnall, ECS Programme Director, said: 'We are really pleased that our portfolio of MSc programmes, covering the range of expertise across the School, is proving popular with so many high quality students from around the world.'

During their JumpStart Freshers Week, new students in ECS have had the opportunity to take part in team-building challenges, social events, acclimatization sessions, and to find their way round the facilities in Zepler Building. However, learning begins in earnest on Monday 6 October, when Semester 1 courses kick off.

The Language Box, an ECS-led project which will make it possible for language teachers to share their learning resources easily, will be launched next week

The new lightweight repository which is the first such resource for language teachers in the UK, is part of the Faroes project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and led by the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

The Language Box, which draws on the best-practice principles of Web 2.0, will be launched at a workshop at the University of Portsmouth (one of the project partners) on Wednesday 15 October when it will go 'live' as a beta.

From that date the Language Box will act as a host for language teachers to deposit their resources and share them with friends and colleagues in their community.

'This has never been done before in the field of languages,' said Dr Yvonne Howard, Language Box Project Leader at the ECS Learning Societies Lab. 'It's a kind of YouTube for teachers. We were clear that we didn't want a dusty old place for information to rot or screens full of metadata. Instead we have developed a facility that really gives teachers what they need to do their job.'

The launch event will take place at the University of Portsmouth (Park Building) from 10.15am-4.15pm on Wednesday 15 October. Those wishing to attend should contact Stavroula Varella at: stavroula.varella@port.ac.uk.

New modelling tools which can simulate the next generation of computers will be described in Professor Mark Zwolinski's inaugural lecture on 15 October.

Professor Mark Zwolinski from the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices Group will deliver his inaugural lecture entitled 'Virtual Computing: Simulation by and of Computers' on Wednesday 15 October, during which he will claim that sophisticated modelling tools are needed if smaller, multi-processor systems are to work in years to come.

'We are reaching the physical limits of transistor sizes and we are getting to a point where it is becoming too expensive to manufacture them,' he said. 'Therefore, we can no longer cobble together massive systems with lots of processors in the hopes that they will work. We have to simulate them first.'

Professor Zwolinski will go on to describe that as chips are being developed which accommodate semiconductor structures below 32 nanometres, it becomes increasingly difficult to produce circuits which are reproducible, behave in the same way and are fault tolerant.

'If we build systems that have lots of processors, they will have faults, so we must build systems that are fault tolerant,’ he said.

At the moment, Professor Zwolinski and his team are developing hardware and software so that they can construct virtual prototypes of fault tolerant systems so that they can assess the feasibility of big computer systems before building them.

The lecture takes place in Nightingale Lecture Theatre, bdg 67 at 4 pm on Wednesday 15 October. Refreshments are available from 3.30 pm.

The lecture will be chaired by Emeritus Professor Henri Kemhadjian.

Silicon.com has named ECS Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, as its No.1 Agenda Setter.

The annual list chooses the top 50 most influential individuals in the worldwide technology and IT industries – business leaders, CEOs, CIOs, techies, open source gurus, security experts, visionaries, entrepreneurs and political figures. Although Sir Tim has been featured on the list for many years, this is his first time at the top spot.

His citation reads:

"His win reflects the profound impact the web has on how we live and work today.

Berners-Lee is as relevant now as he was when he invented the world wide web back in 1989. He continues to push the boundaries of innovation as well as work tirelessly to bring the web to developing countries and maintain its openness.

It's the breadth and depth of his efforts that earn him the title of the most influential individual in the tech industry. As one Agenda Setters judge put it: "When he talks others listen."

Berners-Lee is a leading advocate of the development of the next-generation semantic web, in which 'intelligent' computers will be capable of analysing everything on the web and automatically performing tasks done today by humans, such as finding, sharing and combining information.

He heads up the Web Science Research Initiative with colleagues from MIT in the US and the University of Southampton in the UK to promote the study of web science and help lay the foundations for the future development of the web.

Through his directorship of the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded in 1994, Berners-Lee is at the forefront of the development of web standards. He has also been an outspoken campaigner for net neutrality, arguing against restrictions on content, sites or platforms and the introduction of tiered services by ISPs.

Earlier this year Berners-Lee unveiled the World Wide Web Foundation to spread the web to developing countries and maintain its openness. He says the foundation, which was launched with a $5m grant, is needed to ensure the web serves humanity by connecting people.

The Agenda Setters panel praised Berners-Lee for being "a guardian and promoter of the fundamental social and technical innovation of our era, who is still pushing its boundaries and continues to set the agenda".

Here is an Agenda Setter about whom one can honestly ask: what would life be like without him?"

Other Agenda Setters in the top five were: Steve Jobs, Apple CEO (2); Richard Thomas, UK Information Commissioner (3); Jimmy Wales, Wiki Media Founder (4); and Mike Lynch, Autonomy Founder and CEO (5).

See the full list.