Although the images were captured while the new Mountbatten Building was still (though not for much longer) under construction, Google Streetview provides an excellent tour around the ECS buildings on the University of Southampton Highfield Campus.

The tour begins from the Mountbatten Building on Salisbury Road. The Building is a £100M investment in UK science and technology and contains the latest clean room technology for silicon fabrication and nanotechnology. It is one of the UK's leading research facilities and provides clean room and lab space for researchers in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, the ECS Nano group and Communications group. Researchers in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group are also based in the building, along with researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre, which shares the technical facilities with ECS.

Walking east along Salisbury Road, you will pass Zepler Building, which is where our undergraduate students spend much of their time. You can walk by the two buildings at the corner of University Road and Burgess Road which house our ISIS, SENSe and EPE research groups, covering Information: Signals, Images and Systems, the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems, and Electrical Power Engineering. Also in view on the left as you turn right into University Road is the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, one of only a handful in the UK which are equipped to carry out high-level testing and monitoring of electrical equipment. On the east of University Road as you walk towards the centre of campus you will pass a glass-fronted building which houses three research groups: Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia; Learning Societies Lab; and the Web Science Research Initiative.

ECS is fortunate that its buildings are grouped together and are also very close to the centre of the campus which contains all the facilities needed for student life in Southampton. As you carry on down University Road you will pass the University Library on your left, and the Students Union and Jubilee Sports Centre on your right. The Highfield Campus is only a short bus-ride from the centre of Southampton and many of the students live in Portswood, which has a wide variety of shops, as well as being only a 10-minute walk from the centre of the city.

Commenting on the technological achievement of Google Streetview, Chris Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, said: 'We are aware of the privacy and security concerns that have been raised by the advent in the UK of Google Streetview, but as computer scientists we can't help admiring the technology - it is very very cool!'

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

A major report published today calls for universities and employers to give more priority to ensuring students’ employability skills and industrial experience – areas where ECS is already receiving highly positive feedback from graduate employers.

Launching the report in London this morning (26 March) Future Fit: Preparing graduates for the world of work, (pdf) CBI Director-General Richard Lambert highlighted the importance employers place on ‘employability’ skills – such as self-management, team-working, customer awareness and problem solving – when recruiting graduates. He urged students to gain these vital employability skills and experience of the workplace while at university, so they are better equipped to compete in the increasingly tough jobs market after graduation.

‘Of course businesses don’t expect graduates to arrive on day one fully trained,’ he said, ‘but what they do value in graduates are their people skills, a focus on the customer and a keenness to solve problems. It’s no good graduates regretting not taking up opportunities once they leave university – many universities are keen to help them gain work experience during their degree.’

In the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton the undergraduate degree programmes are designed to ensure that students undertake a range of projects as part of their coursework. This helps them acquire valuable skills including: team-work, project planning, time management, working to a brief, and communication and presentation skills. The projects culminate in the fourth year of the Master of Engineering degrees when students undertake a challenging Group Design Project over three months, where they are tasked to provide the solution to a real industrial problem for an exacting client such as Detica, Roke Manor Research, Nokia, Imagination Technologies, and IBM.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

Students in ECS are also encouraged to take summer internships and 12-month industrial placements and they benefit from a strong interest from leading high-tech companies who are keen to recruit them both for short-term placements and graduate positions.

Professor Alun Vaughan, Deputy Head of School for Education, strongly endorses the CBI view: ‘It is a difficult job market at the moment,’ he said, ‘but we believe that the skills our students gain during their degree programmes will give them a real advantage. Employers are looking for more than just wide-ranging technical knowledge – they are looking for the ability to understand problems in the context of business, and the skills and determination to work individually or as part of a team to get the best result.

‘We not only help ensure that our students have these skills when they graduate but we also encourage students to take industrial placements where possible, which add to their understanding of how the technology they are learning is used in the workplace.’

James Snowdon, a final-year student in Electronic Engineering, spent last summer working in London for Goldman Sachs, providing support to one of their trading teams. ‘I could see the importance of the systems I was developing since they helped the traders to make money!,’ he said. ‘I also gained greater professional awareness which helped increase my confidence in dealing with customers.’ When he graduates this summer James will be joining CapGemini’s graduate programme .

In addition to providing the kinds of degree programmes that are highly valued by graduate employers, ECS also works closely with employers to ensure that its students have excellent opportunities to gain placements and graduate positions. Our ECS Careers Hub web site has affiliates from UK and global high-tech companies and students are encouraged to begin thinking about their future careers from early in the first year of their degrees.

‘We really want to see our students make an impact in the workplace when they graduate,’ said Professor Vaughan. ‘We provide them with the skills with which they can succeed. We want to see those skills put to best use in business and industry.’

A new award from the Engineering and Technology Board for the UK's 'Best Engineering Event' during National Science and Engineering Week has been won by the University of Southampton.

As always the School of Electronics and Computer Science played a significant part in the success of the Science and Engineering Day, which was held this year at Garden Court on the Highfield Campus.

A large number of ECS students, led by Dr Denis Nicole, organized activities that enabled visiting children and their parents to explore robots, make an enhanced reality model, use electronic kits to build radios, make solar-power boats, or design their own computer games. All these activities were popular throughout the day and enabled the children to really try their hand at the activities on offer.

Probably the most imaginative and innovative event held during the day was ‘Blood on the Kitchen Floor’, a murder mystery event devised by ECS PhD student Reena Pau. This was a completely new kind of event for the University’s Science and Engineering Day in which children and their families watched the reconstruction of the murder of a famous chef, scripted and acted by the Nuffield Theatre, before visiting labs in many different University Schools to solve clues to the murderer’s identity using lasers, lie detection, GPS, robots, and DNA analysis.

Postgraduate students in the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics took part at each of the locations and had been specially trained in how to engage the children and present the activities in the context of the narrative.

Blood on the Kitchen Floor was one of the most popular events on the day, with all three sessions fully booked at an early stage. Around 300 people took part and were very enthusiastic about the staging of the event, and the chance to see real engineering and science in action in the University’s labs.

'The murder mystery is a way of putting science into context,’ says Reena Pau. ‘By making kids real investigators in their own drama, they and their families begin to understand how science can be used in day-to-day life.

‘Our own group in ECS demonstrated robotics, where participants had to navigate a robot round a room to pick up a contaminated phone. It’s all about taking science out of the classroom and into real life - which is where it belongs.’

Other engineering activities were provided by the School of Engineering Sciences, the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment, and the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.

The national award is intended to encourage imaginative and inspiring activities and entries were judged according to the following criteria: their effective communication of engineering principles; their innovative and engaging presentation of science and engineering; and their effective self evaluation.

Paul Jackson, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Technology Board, said: "The ETB is delighted to award the University of Southampton the National Science and Engineering Week (NSEW) prize for Best Engineering Event. We congratulate them for entertaining and informing children, students and parents alike in the wonders of engineering.’

ECS has had a long commitment to the UK’s national week of science celebrations, beginning in 1992 when the event was first held on the University campus. Dennis Nicole said: ‘For me, the excitement of these events is seeing children experience the same joy of making things that work---from computer games to "lie detectors" via solar-powered boats and seeing robots---that inspired me into a career in engineering.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

An ECS PhD student has received a prestigious Fellowship award from the Schlumberger Foundation.

Betty Purwandari who is studying for a PhD in the IAM group (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia), has become a Fellow of the Faculty of the Future and awarded a grant of up to $50,000 to continue her research.

The funding will help advance Betty’s research on the impact of the mobile web in rural areas of the developing world. ‘I am fortunate to be supervised by Professor Wendy Hall and by Professor David De Roure,’ said Betty. ‘This makes it possible for me to work with the Web Science Research Initiative, and with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Mobile Web for Social Development. This, together with the award of the Schlumberger Foundation Fellowship, ensures that I am part of an international network of co-operation, working together to empower the mobile web to help less fortunate people in the world’s developing countries.’ The Faculty for the Future awards are open to women academics in science and engineering from developing and emerging countries, and provide funding for advanced graduate study. The long-term goal is to support role models and improve gender balance at the faculty level so that more young women are attracted to scientific disciplines. Grant recipients are, therefore, expected to return to their home countries at the end of their studies to continue their academic careers.

‘Back home I work at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Indonesia,’ said Betty. ‘I hope that my experience gained in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, including my involvement with ECSWomen, can inspire more females in Indonesia to pursue study and careers in science and technology.’

Professor Dame Wendy Hall said: 'This is a fantastic award - both for Betty herself, and for the School of Electronics and Computer Science. Betty's research project and her own individual commitments to applying her research to an important area of development and to acting as a strong role model herself, exemplify aspects of the our own activities in ECS that we believe are particularly important for the future.'

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

The extraordinary technology in the new Southampton Nanofabrication Centre is demonstrated in this image of tungsten atoms - the group of three atoms in the centre of the image is close to being 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.

The image was obtained this week during the commissioning in the new Mountbatten Building cleanroom of the ORION™helium-ion microscope. The ORION™ is the only one of its kind in the UK. Developed and provided by Carl Zeiss SMT, ORION™is pushing scanning beam technologies beyond current limits – in November 2008 it achieved a record 0.24nm resolution, close to the diameter of a single atom.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was instrumental in bringing this new technology to the Mountbatten Building. He says: 'What can be seen here is an an array of tungsten atoms. Each "fuzzy dot" is a single atom – in the centre of the image is the tip of a needle so sharp it has just three atoms on its tip, surrounded by a slightly irregular hexagon of six, with three arrays of six more further out on the sides of the needle.

'This illustrates graphically how tiny our world can be,' he says. 'The conditions needed to make these images need to be stable, vibration-free and clean. A speck of dust is tens of thousands of times bigger than what can be seen here. Vibration utterly imperceptible to a person would destroy the image, like a blurred image from a shaking camera, but millions of times more sensitive. This is, in one sense, the ultimate limit of the nano world – you can’t go smaller than an atom.'

According to Carl Zeiss SMT, this new microscope is capable of providing images of unrivalled high resolution, surface information and material contrast, unachievable with any other microscopy instrument available today and paving the way for a new era in sub-nanometer, ultra-high resolution scanning microscopy.

The ORION™ scanning ion microscope uses a beam of Helium ions — rather than electrons typically used in scanning electron microscopes (SEM) — to image and measure. Since Helium ions can be focused into a substantially smaller probe size and provide a much smaller sample interaction compared to electrons, the ORION™ system can generate higher resolution images with greatly improved material contrast at a substantially extended depth of focus.

The ongoing shrinkage of feature sizes of semiconductor devices makes extreme high resolution microscopy mandatory. 'Some layers of integrated circuits already have reached a thickness of only a few atoms,' Dr Rainer Knippelmeyer, Senior Vice President Operations of Carl Zeiss SMT explained last November. 'Semiconductor manufacturers are in dire need of reliable high-resolution, surface sensitive metrology and process control tools. With the ORION™ helium-ion microscope we offer exactly the tool the industry and nanotechnology research needs and we continue to keep pace with the industry’s rapidly changing requirements.’

The secret behind the extreme high resolution of the helium-ion microscope lies in the proprietary source technology and in the interaction between the scanning ion beam and the surface of the specimen. The source of the microscope is very small and the helium ions emanate from a region as small as a single atom. Unlike electrons, the helium ions have a very small wavelength and hence do not suffer appreciably from adverse diffraction effects – a law of physics which fundamentally limits the imaging resolution of electrons. Also, the helium ion beam triggers signals directly from the surface of the sample and stays very collimated upon entering the sample. This results in very sharp and surface sensitive images at the quoted resolution which can be easily interpreted. In contrast, for a typical SEM, the majority of the secondary electrons that are used for imaging come from deeper and much less confined regions within the sample, creating blurrier images with less resolution than the ORION helium-ion microscope.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

Cutting-edge imaging techniques are being used in the digital restoration of a 2000-year old Roman statue.

The delicately painted statue, which was discovered in the ancient ruins of Herculaneum in 2006 and believed to depict an Amazon Warrior, is now the subject of a joint restoration project by the University of Southampton, the University of Warwick, and the Herculaneum Conservation Project.

Highly sophisticated digital imaging is vital for the recording, subsequent analysis and restoration of cultural heritage material. Experts in archaeological computing led by Dr Graeme Earl of the Archaeological Computing Research Group in the School of Humanities, used a novel form of photography – Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM), developed by HP Labs - to provide a detailed record of the texture and colour of the painted surfaces.

A specially-designed rig, camera structure, and associated custom software was developed in the School of Electronics and Computer Science by Dr Kirk Martinez and the team in the Mechanical Workshop to enable very fast acquisition of PTM data, with variable sample sizes. The rig uses a lightweight tripod running on battery power, making it adaptable enough to use on archaeological sites. The whole kit is highly portable and can be carried in a suitcase. 'It was fascinating to pull together various elements from my imaging research projects in order to solve all the issues for the new rig design,' said Kirk Martinez. The head of the Amazon Warrior was discovered in 2006 in the ancient ruins of Herculaneum, a town close to Pompeii, which was buried in the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The delicate painting of the statue’s features and its fine state of preservation meant that it was regarded as a landmark discovery by archaeologists, providing clues to the decoration of Roman statues that had previously been only guessed at.

The digital restoration project is an initiative of the Packard Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei and the British School at Rome.

‘Our work at Southampton bridges the gap between computing and archaeology in bringing the best that colleagues in engineering, electronics and computer science have to offer to unique artefacts from our past,’ said Dr Earl.

The series of images (different views are illustrated above) resulting from the scanning process is used to produce a single PTM file via the HP Labs PTM fitter software. The PTM viewer enables a virtual light source to be moved across the virtual scene. The viewer can also vary lighting intensity, add additional virtual lights, derive surface models and to carry out image processing tasks such as edge detection.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, tel.023 8059 5453

The final showdown for this year’s Student Robotics challenge takes place on Sunday 19 April at the University of Southampton.

For the last eight months young engineers in Hampshire schools and colleges have been designing, building and programming autonomous robots which will compete against each other in the grand finals. The college students, working in teams of six, have been mentored and supported by students from the University of Southampton who have organized this very successful competition for the second year running.

The challenge for the college students is to build robots that are programmed to complete a task. To do this successfully they are encouraged to produce robots which are sophisticated, capable of programmed movement to perform set tasks, able to ‘see’, and make best use of their own artificial intelligence.

The University students design, build and develop all of the electronics themselves, ensuring that the competing sixth forms and colleges have custom-hardware tailored to their precise needs. Over the last two years of the competition the University students have managed to produce an electronics kit that provides lots of functionality but with the flexibility for the college teams to experiment and develop their own solutions. Each college team receives a weekly visit from a University student – many of them from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, to help them get their robot into shape for the grand final.

'The organization and running of this activity is carried out solely by our students themselves,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'We applaud their commitment to this event since it provides the sixth-form students with the chance to work on a real engineering problem, valuably supplementing their A level studies. Our students are able to develop valuable skills such as project management, team work and group development, which is very beneficial to their future careers.'

This year’s event will be contested by teams from St Anne's School Southampton, Brockenhurst College, Alton College, Peter Symonds College Winchester, and Bedales School, and takes place in the Garden Court, Highfield Campus, from 10 am to 5 pm. The robots compete against each other in a specially designed arena and gain points for their success in completing a number of tasks.

Student Robotics is sponsored by the Motorola Foundation, Bitbox, Student Community Action, the University of Southampton, and Roke Manor Research Ltd.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

Professor Dame Wendy Hall received the official insignia of Dame Commander of the British Empire from HM The Queen at Windsor Castle yesterday (Tuesday 7 April).

Dame Wendy Hall was awarded the DBE in the New Year's Honours List for services to science and technology. She is a Professor of Computer Science 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).

Dame Wendy 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 Dame Wendy 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.

A solar-powered boat designed and built by postgraduate students led by Dr Peter Wilson of ECS is on its way to the United States, the first UK entrant in the annual Solar Splash championship.

After a successful launch on Friday 17 April, Tarka went through her paces on the Itchen River, demonstrating speed and manoeuvrability at the hands of Skipper, Dirk De Jager. The University of Southampton team, largely drawn from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, in conjunction with the student branch of the IEEE, have been working hard on Tarka's design and technology over the last few months, capitalizing on ECS's track record in the development of solar cells and electronics.

Solar Splash, the World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating, takes place in Fayetteville, Arkansas, from 27 to 31 May 2009. Tarka is the first boat from the UK to take part, and Dr Wilson, who is a Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas, as well as a Senior Lecturer in the Electronic Systems and Devices Group in ECS, is confident that she will perform well, despite the short timeframe for planning and design and build.

'It's been a huge achievement to get the boat ready,' he said, 'and Friday's trials showed that it not only has speed, but it has great manoeuvrability, so it should do particularly well in the slalom part of the competition.

'This is the first time that we've done a project of this scale. It allows students to think outside the box when it comes to applications for solar cells. We hope this can be a showcase for technology and the skills here at Southampton on a global scale.'

Solar Splash takes place over five days, with different water-based competitions testing speed, manoeuvrability and endurance. The Team Tarka members going to Arkansas are Dirk De Jager, Rich Bowen, Karim El-Shabrawy and Dr Wilson.

The team are still looking for sponsors to assist with the travel costs, and final build costs. if you feel that you would like to contribute financially to the project, even in a small way, then please contact Dr Wilson by email (prw@ecs.soton.ac.uk) or telephone (023 8059 4162). All contributions will go directly and only to the solar boat project.

See a video made by the Southern Daily Echo at Friday's launch.

PODCAST:172

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

Professor Peter Ashburn is leading a team of University researchers who are developing low-cost, disposable blood-testing kits that can be made available in GPs' surgeries.

With funding of £1.33M from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), Professor Ashburn, Head of the Nano Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, will work with colleagues in ECS, Medicine, Chemistry, to develop a unique method for fabricating nanowires, so that the blood-testing kits can be mass-produced. This will mean that routine blood tests can be carried out in GPs' surgeries, rather than needing to be sent to laboratories, with inevitable delays. The researchers are using nanotechnology similar to that commonly used in computer and television displays to develop this new application.

'Standard clinical laboratory tests currently have limitations outside the laboratory,' said Professor Ashburn. 'This can reduce the impact of new protein biomarkers for diagnosing complex conditions like cancer and chronic inflammation.

'However, one-dimensional nanostructures such as nanowires are ideal for the purposes of diagnosis, since they can be integrated into microfluidic chips that provide a complete sensor system.'

Because of the impact that new technology such as this would have on healthcare, a major part of the research project involves the School of Social Sciences at the University of Southampton in the assessment of sociological aspects involved in the take-up of nanotechnology in healthcare. 'We need to understand how this new mechanism for blood-testing sits in relation to established organizational forms, professional knowledge and inter-professional relations,' said Professor Susan Halford.

'In particular, replacing hospital lab tests with GP-administered tests requires a whole series of subtle and highly politicized changes to the organization of healthcare. Whilst the technology holds enormous potential, if it is to deliver the socially beneficial innovation so highly prioritized in public consultation, we need to develop in-depth understanding of how it can actually come into use.'

The funding award for this research comes from the EPSRC’s Nano Grand Challenge in Healthcare scheme.