Valentin Muenzel, Part 2 student in Electromechanical Engineering, has been shortlisted for the Engineering Undergraduate of the Year Award, sponsored by TargetJobs and npower.

Valentin is one of 10 students to be on the shortlist for the Award for which the prize is £3000. He beat Engineering undergraduates from over 30 leading universities by taking part in a two-stage process. The first part involved an online technical test developed by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in which students' knowledge was assessed by a series of technical multiple choice questions followed by open questions looking at issues such as the future of power generation.

The best entrants were then invited to take part in stage two of the award - a structured telephone interview to assess softer skills such as communications. Valentin will attend the prestigious award-ceremony on Thursday 21 May at Grosvenor House in London, where the winner will be announced in front of an audience of 1000 people.

Chris Phillips, publishing director at Group GTI, the organisers of the TARGETjobs Awards, explains: 'This is an exciting new award category in the TARGETjobs Awards 2009 and is designed to find undergraduates who have that something extra – who are academically above average, natural problem-solvers and great communicators. The engineers of the future will be tackling some of the biggest challenges that society faces not least that of sustainable power. The new award is designed to celebrate the talent within this field, bring recognition to the skills needed to excel within the industry and to raise the profile of engineering careers amongst engineering students.'

The winner of the competition will be offered a job with npower. Bob Athwal, Head of graduate schemes at RWE npower is very proud about supporting the award and comments: 'At npower we are looking for the brightest engineering minds to help us meet future energy demands. This competition will allow us to help develop essential skills and competencies for the next generation of talent.'

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The Mountbatten Building has received a prestigious award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

RIBA awards are made annually and are highly prized in the design and construction industry. The awards are given for buildings that have high architectural standards and make a substantial contribution to the local environment. The RIBA judges praised the Mountbatten Building's 'simple, dynamic forms', adding that the design allowed it to 'embody 21st century scientific research in a sustainable, academic setting.' The Building is also energy efficient, designed to consume 65 per cent less energy than similar complexes. The Mountbatten Building will now be short-listed for the RIBA Stirling Prize honouring the best new buildings in the country.

The Mountbatten Building houses the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre and research groups in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), providing one of Europe's leading multidisciplinary and state-of-the-art clean room complexes. It is a key element in maintaining the University's global reputation for world-leading research in nanotechnology and photonics.

Both inside and outside, with its laboratories, flexible teaching and research space, and impressively spacious atrium, the £55M Mountbatten Building makes a statement. The design is bold and modern, and the building's glass curtain walls - graced by the Peano-Gosper chiral fractal pattern - enable those outside to view the research taking place in the clean rooms. The Building was designed by Jestico + Whiles, the clean room designers and lead consultants were CH2M Hill IDC (UK) Ltd, and the structural engineer was Gifford.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, comments: 'The stunning design of the building matches our claim to be cutting-edge and state-of-the-art, and is a fitting home for the world-leading research it will facilitate.'

Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, adds: 'This magnificent clean room building is unique and world-leading in its imaginative vision for the integration of nanoscience, photonics and optical fibre technology.'

Another of the University's landmark buildings, the £18 million building that marks the entrance to the University's Highfield Campus and also houses three ECS research groups, has been short-listed for a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) award.

For further information, contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453.

An innovative research project based in ECS has won a prestigious award in the world’s annual competition of high impact use of technology to support and enhance learning.

A Learning Impact Award was made to LexDis, a JISC-funded project which is assessing some of the difficulties which arise in e-learning for disabled learners. The award was made last week at Learning Impact 2009, the IMS Global Learning Consortium's annual conference which brings together the world's leading creators, vendors, users, and buyers of learning technology.

LexDis, which is led by Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science’s Learning Societies Lab, and Dr Jane Seale, from the School of Education, received a Best in Category award and was named Best Assistive Technology Network.

The Learning Impact Awards (LIAs) recognize the use of technology to improve learning across all education segments and in all regions of the world. The finalists were evaluated by an expert panel of judges and the attendees at the IMS annual Learning Impact conference and Summit on Global Learning Challenges, held this year in Barcelona.

More than 30 students participated in the LexDis project and fed back their strategies for accessing various technologies.

Some of the key recommendations from the project were: • Improve and increase the availability of desktop personalisation so that students can log in with their own colour, font and accessibility options. • Increase the level of provision for online materials. This is vital for those who cannot handle paper based materials easily. • Increase the level of awareness for the use of alternative formats on the basis that even the most basic PDFs and PowerPoints can cause problems if they cannot be read on screen with speech output or accessed via the keyboard. • Design and develop learning opportunities and support systems that recognise the significant factors that influence disabled students’ use of technology – notably time.

‘Time is not on the disabled student’s side and indeed time is a real issue for every student, so there is a genuine need to keep technologies as simple as possible,’ said E.A. ‘We found it really useful that the students who took part in the LexDis project came up with new ideas for working with inaccessible resources and were often very innovative in the way they carried out research.

‘It is very important that we understand the difficulties that students encounter. Some of them, for example, have to take a PDF and change it into an alternative format to be able to annotate it or cope with diagrams. The knowledge that we have gained from these students is available on the website with guides and tips. It will also be used to look more in depth at the accessibility of Web 2.0 technologies.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

A new series of algorithms which enables computerised agents to haggle and to resolve conflict have been devised by a team led by Professor Nick Jennings.

Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), is lead author of a paper entitled 'Dialogue Games that agents play within a society' which has just been published in the June issue of 'Artificial Intelligence', the premier journal in its field.

In the paper, Professor Jennings and his co-authors describe how their work on developing autonomous computerised agents has progressed to a level where the agents can work autonomously through a mobile phone or a computer.

The new algorithms, which are the culmination of 10 years of research, will now make it possible for these software agents, which carry out tasks such as the organisation of a trip or social event, haggling or negotiating on eBay, to be developed to relate in real-life settings.

‘My view is that haggling will become very much the norm in all forms of on-line societies and that it is simply too costly and time-consuming to be done by humans,’ said Professor Jennings.

The academics have developed Argumentation-Based Negotiation (ABN) algorithms that provide agents with strategies to argue and resolve conflict in a multi-agent task allocation scenario. They also carried out experiments to ascertain the usefulness of argumentation for agents at various points in the negotiation process. ‘This work takes us much closer to having autonomous computerised agents which work on our behalf to plan social or business events,' said Professor Jennings. 'Through our earlier work we observed that when agents operate in a society with incomplete information and with diverse and conflicting influences, they may in certain cases lack the knowledge, motivation and/or capacity to abide by all their social influences. Our ABN system provides them with strategies to negotiate their social influences, thus enhancing their performance within a society.'

Co-authors of 'Dialogue Games that agents play within a society' are: Nishan Karunatillake, ECS, Dr Iyad Rahwan, British University in Dubai, Peter McBurney, University of Liverpool.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Dr Leslie Carr promoted EPrints as a practical solution for business management within US institutions when he spoke this week in Atlanta, USA.

Dr Carr, Technical Director of EPrints, the world’s leading software for producing open access institutional repositories, which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, explained the EPrints Services sustainability strategy at a panel session at the Open Repositories Conference 2009.

He also delivered a presentation entitled: 'From the Desktop to the Cloud: Leveraging Hybrid Storage Architectures in Your Repository' in which he presented a new hybrid model for managing information, which enables EPrints to provide practical, effective solutions for research data management throughout the whole business.

‘Open Access is becoming more prominent in the States now that Harvard has adopted an Open Access mandate,’ said Dr Carr. ‘We believe that there will now be more demand for repositories which provide a business service to the whole institution rather than just existing as library-oriented services.’

The School of Electronics and Computer Science leads the world in open access; its EPrints software is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

EPrints version 3.2 was also launched at the conference, with technical sessions describing the more than 25 improvements that are being added to its capabilities.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Professor Nigel Shadbolt will be talking at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Digital Footprints.

The UK has one of the most advanced digital surveillance systems in the world providing the authorities and other institutions with large amounts of information about all our lives. Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampotn, will join systems engineer Martyn Thomas and Ed Gibson, Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft UK and former FBI special agent, to share inside information about how our everyday activities — from credit card spending to internet use — are monitored, recorded and used for anything from tracking international criminals to recording our complex shopping habits.

The event on Sunday 7 June takes place at 4.15pm in Cheltenham Town Hall as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival 09.

The winning team in this year's Software Design Group Project designed an imaginative application that enables tourists to explore Southampton's historic past.

The Software Design Group Project requires second-year Electronics students to produce a novel software application designed to run on an HP iPAQ. The Project is sponsored by Imagination Technologies, and the winning team members are awarded a PURE digital radio.

Working in teams over the second semester, the students have to produce an application which makes use of the built-in GPS, uses a database, has a clearly designed user interface, is coded in C#, and is designed for the Southampton area. The students produced a range of inventive applications, including lecture trackers, Freshers’ Friend guides to campus, and timetabling planners.

This year’s winners focused on Southampton’s historical past and produced an application called Lost in Time, an interactive historical tour of the city. Twelve historic sites in the city are covered in the tour. Designed to be used by tourists visiting Southampton’s city centre, the idea is that the GPS device would be lent out from the tourist information office in the city centre for a day. Alternatively a person could download the application to a personal digital assistant (PDA) or mobile device with GPS capabilities before visiting the city.

To meet the project requirements, the students decided the device should display a map of Southampton, showing the user’s current position and the location of the multiple historic sites within the city centre. Information for each site would be held on the device in the form of a database and displayed depending on the user’s location. Four display modes then enable the user to access information according to how they make the tour or where on the tour they happen to be, ensuring convenience and flexibility of access to the information.

The winning team were: Thomas Heslington, Kat Kirk, Jonathan Lamyman, Paolo Mennea, and Daniel Nevill.

Team Tarka, the first-ever UK entry in Solar Splash, the World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating, put up a spirited challenge, coming away with a string of awards and a very creditable 10th place in this year’s event.

Solar Splash took place over five days, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, ending yesterday (Sunday). Throughout the event different water-based competitions tested speed, manoeuvrability, endurance, design, and innovation. Tarka ended the event in 10th place, and won the Teamwork Award, the Sportsmanship Award, and achieved ‘Best Score for a Rookie Team’. The boat was placed third in the qualifying event and came joint first in the Silver Medal race. With a Union Jack flying from the boat and emblazoned on its prow, it wasn’t hard to spot Tarka amongst the other competitors.

Finishing in the top half of the teams is quite an achievement for the first attempt, and one that only began a few months ago. Dr Peter Wilson of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is a Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas, decided to enter a University team when he attended last year’s event. ‘Getting into the top ten was a dream this year, our first attempt, but I didn’t really dare to think we’d actually do it,’ he said. ‘The strength of some of the teams is just scary, but the best compliment paid to us was almost every team saying ‘We need to watch out for you guys next year!â€?.’

Peter enlisted postgraduate students largely drawn from the School of Electronics and Computer Science to build the boat and raise sponsorship for the trip, and despite the short timescale from when planning began earlier this year, the boat performed really well over the competition. Peter paid tribute to the team: ‘The final race was one of the best pieces of overall teamwork I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

Team members Dirk De Jager, Karim El-Shabrawy, Rich Bowen and Peter Wilson are now on their way back to the UK, and planning will soon begin for next year’s event, which will include undergraduate students in the team.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, paid tribute to Team Tarka's hard work and commitment: ‘The team’s efforts and achievements demonstrate considerable engineering excellence in a multi-faceted task,’ he said. ‘We look forward to welcoming them back to the School and enjoying the party!’

For more information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

A repository which will make it possible for colleges and individuals in the arts to store and present their work in a creative way will be unveiled tomorrow (Wednesday 3 June) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.

Kultur, a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has used the world-leading EPrints software from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton to develop a joint pilot repository for the University of the Arts London, the University for the Creative Arts and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. The project will be officially completed tomorrow and an event to mark the occasion will be held at Whitechapel Art Gallery.

'Up to now, the focus of most repositories has been science and engineering and published articles,' said Dr Leslie Carr of ECS. 'Kultur has provided us with an opportunity to use EPrints to develop the first comprehensive institutional repository for the arts.'

The Kultur project provides a flexible, multimedia pilot repository capable of showcasing a wide range of outputs from digital versions of paintings, photography, film, graphic and textile design to records of performances, shows and installations.

The three institutions involved will now develop their own open repositories to store and showcase their creative work.

'This will make an immense difference to our institutions,' said Andrew Gray, Kultur Project Officer, University of the Arts London. 'It is the first repository of its kind in the arts world; there are others but there hasn't been a visual one. The benefit of Kultur is that it will enable us to share our practice-based research across our colleges and with other institutions.'

'It will also open up the art world, which will link up the often lone artist with the wider arts community,' Dr Carr added.

The pilot repository will be showcased at Whitechapel Art Gallery between 6-8pm on Wednesday 3 June. The event will include presentations from Andy McGregor, JISC, Seymour Roworth-Stokes, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research at the University for the Creative Arts, Andrew Carnie, Researcher at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and Pat Christie, Director of Library and Learning Resources, University of the Arts London.

Kultur was a collaboration between all three arts institutions in partnership with the Visual Arts Data Service and EPrints.

EPrints software, developed in 2000 by the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, is used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

Images of the pilot repository are available at: http://www.eprints.org/kultur/FrontPage.png http://www.eprints.org/kultur/Hackney.pdf http://www.eprints.org/kultur/Hackney.pdf http://www.eprints.org/kultur/MiniFlux.pdf

For more information, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

The School has achieved further excellent rankings in university league tables, with the publication today (3 June) of The Times University Guide.

ECS comes second in the UK for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and fourth in the UK for Computer Science and IT, mirroring the rankings achieved last month in The Guardian University Guide. While The Guardian Guide is particularly aimed at first-time students and concentrates heavily on teaching quality rankings and student satisfaction rather than research ratings,* The Times Guide takes a broader view and looks also at the overall strengths of departments and their research rankings.

While the School warns against an over-reliance on league tables results, Dr Andy Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies in ECS, said that it was pleasing to see the School's very positive strengths endorsed by the league tables. 'These results are particularly encouraging for our students just about to graduate,' he said. 'They can see how highly their degrees are regarded, which is also very much endorsed by the number of companies who approach us looking for graduate recruits.'

Dr Gravell also looked forward to the University Open Day on 3 July when ECS will be providing a full range of tours, talks, and demonstrations for prospective students. 'The factors leading to our success are, I believe, our hardworking, knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff and students, our leading-edge courses, and our excellent educational facilities,' he said. 'We look forward to welcoming visitors at the Open Day, and have full programmes planned for our degrees in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Systems, Information Technology and Software Engineering.'

The University is holding three Open Days this year: Friday 3 July, Friday 4 September and Saturday 5 September. To book a place on the ECS programme, visit the University's Open Day web site.

The University of Southampton is ranked 15th equal in this year's Times Guide; see the Times Guide's description of the University.

*Find out more about ECS research rankings in the Research Assessment Exercise.

For further information, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0) 23 8059 5453.