The contribution to the School of three long-standing and eminent members of staff was celebrated at a joint retirement event this week.

The three staff members, Professor Dave Nunn, former Head of the ISIS group, Dr Neil Ross of the ESD group, and Maralyn Knight, PA to the Head of School and Secretarial Services Manager, had between them over 60 years service to the School, and their contributions were described and tribute paid to their achievements by (respectively) Professor Bob Damper, Professor Chris Harris, and Professor Harvey Rutt.

Professor Ghazy A Makky Almakky, Cultural Attache to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in London, visited the new Mountbatten Building today (22.10.08).

Professor Almakky was paying a visit to the University, which has recently seen a surge in the numbers of students from Saudi Arabia, and during his visit to ECS he met Saud Al Garni, who has recently begun an MSc in Nanoelectronics, and Saqib Khursheed, who is working on a PhD in the Electronic Systems and Devices group.

He also met Head of School Professor Harvey Rutt, who gave Professor Almakky and his party a short tour of the new £55M Mountbatten Building.

Students who signed up to act as mentors in this year's Student Robotics challenge have begun their training on programming the robots and mentoring the teams taking part.

This year a larger number of teams has joined the competition, even from as far afield as Alton. The competition is entirely run by student volunteers, drawn largely from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, but also involving students from the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics.

The University students undertake the building of the robot electronics, but the school students then have the task of programming the robots to perform a specified task, which forms the basis of the Grand Challenge final, taking place at the University in April.

Sponsorship for some of the local school teams is still being sought. If you are interested in providing sponsorship, contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is using open source software, including ECS's EPrints, in its bid to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the world.

The party, which has 24 million members, has embarked on a policy to go digital in all its activities to increase communications between headquarters and state units and to provide a modern and dynamic image to potential voters.

EPrints is being used by the party as an internal document library. According to linux.com, the party's IT Cell believes that promoting open source and open standards is an imperative for India and is expected to lead to further developments in the future.

Exactly three years to the day from the fire that destroyed a leading research facility, the imposing building that has taken its place is now open to students and staff.

The new Mountbatten Building on the Highfield Campus occupies the same footprint as its predecessor, and is a substantial architectural triumph. The £55M building is also one of Europe’s leading multidisciplinary and state-of-the-art clean room complexes. It provides flexible research space for world-leading technology development in nanotechnology and photonics for the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

Both inside and outside, with its laboratories, teaching space, and impressively spacious atrium, the Mountbatten Building makes a statement. The design is bold and modern, the building’s glass curtain walls – graced by a mathematical fractal pattern – enable those outside to view the research taking place in the clean rooms.

“The new building has literally risen like a phoenix from the ashes of its predecessor,â€? said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

“It provides the environment and facilities that will enable us to carry out fundamental and transformative research at the nanoscale and our cleanrooms will enable us to forge new partnerships with others working at the leading edge of technology. It fully realizes the University’s commitment made the day after the fire, to ensure that our research would continue in even better and more appropriate surroundings.â€?

“On behalf of the ORC, I am very excited at the prospect of getting our laboratories back after three years of making-do in temporary facilities,â€? said Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre. “This magnificent clean room building is unique and world leading in its imaginative vision for the integration of nanoscience, photonics and optical fibre technology. With the devastating fire well and truly behind us, we can now rapidly rebuild our reputation as the foremost photonics centre in the world.â€?

With staff and students now based in the building, fitting out of the clean rooms is under way to ensure the extremely rigorous environmental conditions required for the research to take place at the nanoscale.

The day following the fire, the University’s Vice-Chancellor Bill Wakeham had promised that: “We are committed to rebuilding, and that out of these tragic events will emerge something bigger and better.â€?

Today Professor Wakeham commented that: “We have been able to fulfil my promise made three years ago. Staff and students are starting to move in to this stunning new facility and I look forward to seeing the positive impact that this will have on their world-leading research.â€?

A system which will use networks of computerised agents to cope with disaster scenarios such as outbreaks of fires, will be outlined by an ECS researcher on Guy Fawkes night.

Professor Nick Jennings from the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has picked Wednesday 5 November to tell an audience comprised of businesses and academia at Park Centre, Farnborough, about ALADDIN, an ambitious £5.5 million five-year research programme aimed at developing computerised agents for use in disaster recovery or terrorist attacks, which has just reached its half-way point.

ALADDIN stands for Autonomous Learning Agents in Decentralized Data and Information Networks.

Professor Jennings believes that the UK Fire and Rescue Service is a likely potential client for some of the applications already developed by ALADDIN.

"We are developing decentralised information systems that can continue to operate effectively when there is a fire or in other extremely difficult circumstances," said Professor Jennings.

"We use computerised agents which can sense, act and interact in order to achieve individual and collective aims. Central to this endeavour is the effective coordination of the different actors and, to this end, we've developed a rich series of algorithms for inter-agent co-operation and negotiation."

ALADDIN is one of a number of programmes that bring leading academic groups to key industrial challenges through the BAE Systems/EPSRC Strategic Partnership, with the objective of delivering high-quality research and enhancing industrial capabilities.

The ALADDIN team comprises internationally-leading researchers in complex adaptive systems from the Universities of Southampton, Bristol and Imperial College; in fusion, inference and learning from the University of Oxford and Imperial; and in decentralised architectures from BAE Systems.

One of the challenges facing the researchers is to bring together work from a number of hitherto distinct fields, such as information fusion, inference, decision-making, and machine-learning. This work then needs to be combined with work from multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design and mathematical modelling of collective behaviour in order to give a collective view on behaviour.

"As ever more information sources become available - through environmental sensors, intranets, and so on - the problem of obtaining and fusing the right information when making decisions and taking actions is becoming increasingly pressing," said Professor Jennings.

The British Computer Society is bring its annual Careers Fair to the School for the first time on Wednesday 12 November.

The Event attracts some of the biggest names in graduate employment for computer science and electronics, and will be of interest to all ECS students for future careers, as well as for internship opportunities.

Companies participating this year are: Logica; Siemens, Research Machines, IBM, Microsoft, Fujitsu, Capgemini, Accenture, BT, CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation).

The event takes place in Building 32, with the company stands in the Coffee Room on Level 4, and presentations taking place in other parts of the building.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science holds its own Careers Fair on Wednesday 11 February 2009.

Biometrics could be a major force in providing better security systems and combating data loss in the future, according to an ECS researcher.

Biometrics covers a range of measurable biological characteristics, including fingerprints, iris patterns, even ears, and the way people walk, which can be used to identify individuals.

Research into the biometrics of gait analysis has been pioneered at ECS by Professor Mark Nixon and Dr John Carter, and their work is featured in an article and video on the BBC web site.

The BBC reports that Professor Nixon and his team have designed a biometric tunnel which employs eight cameras that feed data to sophisticated modelling software which collect the data. Professor Nixon is currently enlarging the size of the team's database by collecting information from a wide range of people.

Gait analysis is gaining interest from the security services, and it has already been admitted as evidence in UK courts.

Professor Lajos Hanzo has been awarded the Sir Monty Finniston Award for Achievement by the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Speaking at the Awards Dinner on 3 November, Robin Gill, Chief Executive of the IET said that the Achievement Awards provided an opportunity to celebrate outstanding individuals in the world of engineering. He added 'Each nominee has contributed hugely to their field of work. Through their hard work, they have gained national and international respect from their peers.'

The citation for Professor Hanzo, Head of the ECS Communications research group, read: 'He has made an outstanding contribution to the wireless multimedia industry over a period of 30 years. He has led many research projects across different critical areas including modulation, coding, video and audio compression. His work is widely implemented in many of today’s communication systems. In addition to his respected contribution, Professor Hanzo has acted as a supervisor, tutor and mentor to many of today’s leading wireless engineers.'

ECS engineers have developed a new configurable chip which can correct faults in newly-manufactured transistors and can be implemented in mainstream devices such as computers and mobile phones.

In a paper just published in Electronics Letters, Dr Peter Wilson with Dr Reuben Wilcock from the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), describes the Configurable Analogue Transistor (CAT) which he and his team have developed, and for which they have a patent pending. The CAT approach can be applied to batches of transistors which in testing after manufacture prove to have an unacceptably high variability.

According to Dr Wilson, the manufacturing process for deep submicron technologies is currently very expensive, with the cost of failed devices running into huge figures. Designers create new chip designs and generally simulate how they will perform. When the silicon wafers are produced they will then undergo rigorous electrical testing to ensure that they are working. It is at this point that the designer often realises that some of the chips do not work, which creates a problem of reduced yield, i.e. a reduced number of working chips in a batch. This has been an increasing problem for Integrated Circuit designers over the last few years as process technology dimensions have become increasingly small, and the corresponding variability of devices worsened.

'One of the biggest challenges we face when shrinking devices in these new technology nodes is that there is increasing variability in the resulting devices and this is causing unacceptably poor yields in the circuits being produced - particularly in analogue and mixed signal devices where performance is at a premium,' said Dr Wilson. 'Now with CAT, we can take whole batches of chips and tighten their performance characteristics resulting in massive improvements in yield. Improvements in variability of up to 80 percent can be achieved using this approach.'

According to Dr Wilson, the CAT technique can also be applied to existing products to improve their performance and longevity.

'As technology changes over time, the CAT technique allows us to reconfigure devices so that products continue to work,' said Dr Wilson. 'For example, remote circuits in satellites and sensor devices can be "reprogrammed" and effectively recalibrated to take account of changing characteristics over time and environmental conditions.'