Innovative marine sensor technologies developed by ECS researchers working with the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, have been tested on a research expedition.

Nine months into the four-year £2 million project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Professor Hywel Morgan from the School of Electronics and Computer Science and Dr Matt Mowlem at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, have developed the first of a new generation of miniaturised sensors to measure marine environments and tested them at depths of 1600 metres. The sensors were tested during a a research cruise on RSS Discovery to the Canary Islands (D333).

'These sensors were dropped into the water strapped to a device which measures the temperature and salinity of the oceans as a function of depth, and the sensors measured the nitrate and nitrite concentrations, which are important characteristics of ocean chemistry. Phosphate, iron and manganese can also be measured with this technology,’ said Professor Morgan.

Now that the researchers have established that the sensors are capable of measuring harsh environments, they will develop them further so that they can be deployed for months at a time.

'This first generation of sensor systems as they stand are about the size of a large drinks bottle,’ Professor Morgan added. ‘We aim to make them much smaller so that they are capable of operating remotely without bulky, expensive and power-hungry support systems.’

The project has two strands: to develop lab-on-a-chip chemical and biochemical analysers to detect nutrients and pollutants at the ultra low concentrations found in the ocean, and to develop small chips to identify individual phytoplankton in the oceans. The development of these biogeochemical sensors over the next three years will provide a new technology platform for marine scientists, and have applications in many allied activities such as those undertaken by the water industry, in environmental impact assessments and in monitoring ship ballast water.

‘We believe that the development of micro-sensing systems that will be utilised across the broad front in marine sensing will be a world first,’ said Dr Mowlem.

Images of the sensor chip and some taken on the cruise can be obtained from Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (tel. 023 8059 5453; email j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

A new website to help treat fatigue in people with Multiple Sclerosis has been developed by a University team including technology input from ECS.MS

Invigor8, the new website, uses Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) to treat fatigue in people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). It will be completed on Friday (12 December) and is ready to be trialled.

The research team, led by Professor Rona Moss-Morris at the School of Psychology, with the technology side led by Dr Gary Wills of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, now seeks 40 people in the UK who experience MS fatigue to take part in the web-based trial which will begin on 12 January 2009.

The team adopted an approach which used eight sessions of manualised CBT to treat fatigue in MS effectively, and developed an Internet-based version of the package.

'We know this works because six months after the manual treatment, not only had fatigue substantially reduced, but people with MS reported levels of fatigue that were significantly lower than those of a matched healthy, non-fatigued group,' said Professor Moss-Morris.

The researchers found that a limitation of the manual package is that skilled CBT therapists are not available to many people with MS due to the lack of available resources and difficulty of access. The new web-based package will enable effective treatment for more people with minimal therapist time.

The team worked with expert service users to develop eight sessions to assess users’ levels of fatigue, their patterns of activity and rest, and then to enable them to manage issues such as sleep patterns and stress. The programme is interactive and personalised allowing people to set goals for managing their fatigue and to work towards developing and maintaining a healthier lifestyle. Lawrence Gilbert, an expert service user who has been closely involved in the process from the outset, said:

'MS can be like a Duracell battery, you could be going along fine and then suddenly the energy drains out of you. My concern has always been that the fatigue, which is a part of the condition, could be wrongly attributed to being just "all in the mind". The approach taken by the Southampton team is not like that at all.'

The research programme is funded by the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

People interested in knowing more about the trials which begin next month should contact: Louise Bell on L.Bell@soton.ac.uk

ECS researchers have achieved exceptional success in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.

Computer Science has been ranked joint second in the UK for the quality of its research, with 85 per cent of its research work receiving either the top 4* rating (defined as ‘world leading’) or the 3* rating (‘internationally excellent’). In Electronics and Electrical Engineering (in which ECS was assessed jointly with the University's Optoelectronics Research Centre),* ECS (and the ORC) came second in the ‘medals’ tables, with 42 researchers rated as achieving research of either world-leading or internationally excellent quality. It also came second in the tables provided by Research Fortnight based on benchmarks combining 'quality' with 'volume' and known as 'market share' and 'power', which are likely to be used in the financial settlement next year. Overall ECS submitted 106 staff to this Research Assessment Exercise, and 97.5 per cent of their research work was deemed to be of international standard.

‘This is an excellent outcome for the School,’ said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. ‘We have achieved outstandingly good results and demonstrated once again that the driving force for the School remains its commitment to research work that is world-leading and transformative.

‘Across the School our academic staff are producing research that is pushing the boundaries of their subject disciplines and finding applications in areas such as transport, medicine, the environment, security, and communications, which are of real benefit to industry and society. While some caution is needed in the way that results can be interpreted across different subjects areas, the RAE results nonetheless show that our peers in universities and industry place a very high value on the work that is being achieved here in Southampton.’

The RAE results in ECS bring a very positive end to a year that has seen exciting and innovative initiatives across the School’s research groups. Most recently the School was a major beneficiary in the awards to UK universities of Centres for Doctoral Training by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). ECS will play a key role in two new Centres: for Web Science and Complex Systems Simulation. The School’s new Mountbatten Building and Southampton Nanofabrication Centre is now open and multi-million pound pieces of equipment are being installed in its clean rooms, with the prospect of an exciting future for the School’s research horizons.

‘These excellent results demonstrate to our partners that they can be assured of the international quality of the School’s research,’ said Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Deputy Head of School for Research. ‘The results also provide an excellent basis for students who are considering undertaking PhD research in leading Schools. Our strength and depth of research excellence is fully apparent in these results.’

The RAE is a UK Government-backed assessment carried out by independent reviewers who report on the quality of different areas of research in each university across the whole sector. The results of the RAE will be used to determine future funding for research groups from 2009. In the last RAE (2001) ECS achieved the top gradings of 5* for its research in Computer Science and in Electronics and Electrical Engineering.

The University of Southampton achieved excellent results across the board, confirming its position as one of the top universities in the country.

*The Optoelectronics Research Centre is one of the world’s leading institutes for photonics research, based at the University of Southampton.

Seventy ECS students graduated in the University's first winter Graduation ceremony.

Most of the ECS students who graduated on 17 December had taken the one-year MSc degree, which runs for twelve months from October. The MSc degree covers ten different subject areas, and is intended to be a prestigious one-year course at the cutting edge of technology, in subjects for which there is great demand for industry.

'This has been the best day of my life,' said Mustansar Ghazanfar, who graduated top of his class in the MSc in Software Engineering.

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Muddasser Alam, also graduating with an MSc in Software Engineering, said that he had never been to a ceremony like this before, but that he was extremely impressed, and that it was a special day for him.

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In another unusual feature of the graduation ceremony, the academic party was piped into the Graduation Hall by Dr Peter Wilson, of ECS, who is an expert bagpiper.

Both Mustansar and Mudasser are writing blogs on their life in the School, and you can also view a video of the graduation with their comments.

Professor Wendy Hall, CBE, has been appointed DBE in the New Year Honours List for services to science and technology.

One of the world’s leading computer scientists, Wendy Hall is a Professor at the University of Southampton and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007. Her influence on the development of computer science has been fundamental not only in her academic work and the many successful research initiatives in which she has been involved, but also for the large number of prominent roles she has held in the scientific and technological community.

In 2003 Professor Hall was appointed President of the British Computer Society (BCS), the UK’s leading professional body for IT. In 2005 she became the first woman to be elected Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and in July 2008 she took up office as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first person from outside North America to hold this role in the organization’s 60-year history.

She is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, and a founding member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. In November 2008 she was one of 25 European figures honoured for their contribution to Information, Communication and Technology by the EU. Among the many awards she has won is the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership (2006).

She is known throughout the community for her energy and vision and, in addition to her large number of commitments in areas of policy development, she continues to advance new research directions. In 2006, she was one of the founders of the Web Science Research Initiative, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner. They are pioneering the new discipline of Web Science, to develop a better understanding of the architectural principles that led to the Web’s growth and success, and ensure that these support the Web’s future development.

Throughout her career Wendy Hall has been a prominent and vocal advocate of women’s opportunities in science, engineering and technology. In her research and her public life she has sought to ensure that women are equal beneficiaries of technological advance, and her example of achievement and dedication has made her a distinguished and powerful role model for women. ‘I am thrilled to have been honoured in this way,’ said Professor Hall. ‘It is of course exciting for me personally and for my family, but it is also a tribute to all the people I have worked with in my career as a scientist and engineer both at Southampton and in the wider community.’

Professor Dame Wendy Hall took her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Southampton, where she met her husband Peter Chandler. They have been married for nearly 30 years and live in the New Forest.

See coverage of the announcement on BBC Technology, The Guardian, and TechRadar.com

As it reaches its third birthday, the ECS Learning Societies Lab (LSL) has secured almost £1M of funding for projects which will greatly enhance student learning experience.

LSL has just been awarded £800,000 from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) for projects to improve student assessment and to develop light-weight YouTube-type repositories with easier access for students. ‘As a university, we have a major interest in improving the e-learning environment and setting up systems so that students can have more access to materials from which they can learn more independently,’ said Dr Hugh Davis, who heads LSL.

'Today's students expect high-quality teaching,' said Dr Davis. 'As customers they expect to get their materials quickly and a YouTube-like repository is an easy way to access them.'

LSL has been developing light-weight repositories under the EdShare initiative, a resource for collaboration and sharing materials used in teaching and learning across the University.

Dr Davis and his team have also developed the Language Box, the first lightweight repository for language teachers in the UK.

The newly-funded e-Assessment in Higher Education (EASiHE) project will work towards accelerating the electronic assessment process and Dr Davis and his colleagues also contributed to the successful grant application for eAssignment System, a new process which will make it possible for students to get immediate feedback electronically when they submit assignments, which will be rolled out over the University as a whole this year.

Over 30 leading graduate recruiters will be attending the ECS Engineering and Technology Careers Fair on Wednesday 11 February.

Despite the economic downturn, competition among the country's leading technology companies to recruit highly skilled graduates is still hot, and Southampton students have a very strong reputation for the breadth and depth of their knowledge of different technologies, as well as for the strong mix of practical and theoretical understanding gained in their degree programmes.

The ECS Engineering and Technology Careers Fair was held for the first time in 2008, in response to demand for our students from business and industry. Over 1000 students attended last year's event, and so this year's Fair, on Wednesday 11 February, is already hotly anticipated.

The event takes place in the Garden Court, Students' Union, on the Highfield Campus, and is open to all students in the University, with a particular emphasis on engineering and science degrees. As well as graduate recruitment opportunities, the companies will also be offering summer internships and industrial placements. The company representatives will be available at their exhibition stands throughout the day, and there is also a special programme of presentations.

Companies attending include: aap3, Accenture, BAE Systems, Bloomberg, CapGemini, Corefiling, Detica, Dstl, Ericsson, Enterprise Recruitment, Factset, Fidessa, Graduate Jobs South, GRC Ltd, IBM, Imagination Technologies, JP Morgan, MatchTech, MBDA, Mendeley, NATS, Nokia, NDS, Network Rail, Parkair Systems, PPD, Qualcomm, Roke Manor Research, Schlumberger, Selex Galileo, Siemens, and STR.

for further information about the Fair contact Joyce Lewis.

See our video podcast of the 2008 Fair.

The Diversity in Engineering Campaign, being launched today (Thursday 15 January) by the Royal Academy of Engineering and led by Professor Dame Wendy Hall of ECS, aims to ensure that UK engineering blazes a trail to a diverse profession that will benefit from the skills of all sectors of society.

The Royal Academy of Engineering believes that many more engineers and scientists will be needed to provide the innovation needed to overcome the current economic recession, and recognizes that because of changes in the country’s demographics these engineers of the future will need to be drawn from different, non-traditional backgrounds, including:

•Women – who now make up over 45 per cent of the UK labour market, but make up fewer than 6 per cent of engineering professionals •Ethnic minorities – 80 per cent of the ethnic minority population in the UK is aged 16 to 35, providing a significantly increasing proportion of the workforce in the future •People with disabilities: around 18 per cent of the working population have a disability

Throughout her career Dame Wendy Hall has been a prominent and vocal advocate of women’s opportunities in science, engineering and technology: ‘It is vital for the UK that we recruit the brightest young people into engineering and science,’ she says, ‘including new talent from families and schools who might never have thought about engineering as a career.

‘The financial turmoil and the recession actually give us a huge opportunity to entice people who have studied engineering and science away from the City and back into innovating for the future, which is where they are badly needed.’

Dame Wendy will be speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London this evening (Thursday 15 January), when hers will be one of three portraits (right) of ‘Inspirational Women Engineers’ being presented to the Academy by the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET (science, engineering and Technology).

Web Science ’09, the first European conference on Web Science, is dedicated to the presentation of research into ‘Society on the Web’.

The conference will be held in Athens from 18 to 20 March 2009 and is organized by the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and the Foundation for the Hellenic World (FHW). It will bring together computer scientists and social scientists, and distinguished keynote speakers include Noshir Contractor, Joseph Sifakis and Tim Berners-Lee.

The World Wide Web does not exist without the participation of people and organizations; indeed significant proportions of people’s lives are now spent on-line in many countries. The Conference will address major issues of people’s behaviour and motivation on-line, their ability to trust websites or agents, their security and privacy. Crucially: how can the design of the Web of the future ensure that a system on which - as Tim Berners-Lee put it – democracy and commerce depends, remains 'stable and pro-human'?

In addition to the presented papers, on issues such as e-Commerce, Government and Political Life, Social Relationships, Cybercrime, Health, Culture Online, and e-Learning, the Conference will also include the Second Web Science Curriculum Workshop and a Workshop on Understanding the Impact of the Web on Scholarly Communication.

‘This Conference allows us to bring together two groups of researchers, from Computer Science and the Social Sciences, to explore the development of the Web across many different areas,’ said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, of WSRI. ‘This interdisciplinary endeavour, bringing together computer scientists and social scientists perhaps for the first time, is crucial to understanding both the human behaviour and technological design that shape the Web and its use.’

Web Science 09 will be held at The Theatron at the Hellenic Cosmos of the Foundation of the Hellenic World.

An ECS undergraduate project will be featured later this year on BBC's The One Show.

Presenter Miranda Krestovnikoff visited ECS to film a swarm of tiny robots, inspired by the behaviour of an ant community, which were designed and built as part of an undergraduate project by ECS Electronics students.

The robots have already attracted worldwide publicity after they were exhibited at the Artificial Life Conference in Winchester last August. They cost around £24 to make, so are some of the cheapest robots in the world, and are constructed from parts which are readily commercially available.

Rob Spanton and Jeff Gough, who graduated in July 2008 from ECS and who are now PhD students in the School, demonstrated the robots to Miranda, and explained how they worked together to complete a food-gathering task, communicating with each other used infrared technology.

The sequence will form part of a week-long series on The One Show focusing on biomimetics.