With the announcement today (Wednesday 3 June) that University College London has just adopted the UK's 22nd (and the world's 84th) mandate to make all of its research output Open Access (by depositing it in UCL's Institutional Repository, UCL Eprints), it is clear that the United Kingdom continues to lead the world in Open Access.

With its 13 funder mandates and 9 institutional/departmental mandates so far, the UK still has the planet's highest proportion of Open Access Mandates. But the rest of the world is catching up (see Figure).

Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and University of Southampton, has just documented how mandates to provide Open Access to research output have almost doubled globally in the year that has elapsed since Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted the world’s 44th Open Access mandate in May 2008.

The world's first Open Access mandate was adopted in 2002 by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). Southampton had previously designed, in 2000, the first free, Open Source software for creating Open Access Institutional Repositories, Eprints, now used the world over.

In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology (as urged by evidence provided by the University of Southampton and Loughborough University) recommended that “all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online [and] that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.â€? Research Councils UK went on to make a clean sweep, with all seven councils mandating Open Access in 2006-8.

Professor Stevan Harnad, leader and archivangelist for the world-wide Open Access movement, and a Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, comments: 'Alma Swan's analysis shows that the UK is at last going to lose its lead, as the global growth spurt of mandates we had all been awaiting appears to have begun.

'The globalization of Open Access mandates is of course something that all UK universities heartily welcome as a win/win outcome, optimal and inevitable for research and researchers worldwide.

'Open access is essentially reciprocal. The only way every university on the planet can gain open access to the research output of every other university on the planet is by each providing open access to its own research output.’

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

Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been given a special role by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information.

Over the next six months, Sir Tim Berners-Lee will serve in an advisory capacity to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and he will work with Professor Nigel Shadbolt to form a panel of technical and delivery experts to oversee the implementation of key recommendations, including overseeing the creation of a single online point of access for public UK datasets, and bringing forward specific proposals to implement and extend to the wider public sector the public sector information principle. The panel will also drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes, and work with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards.

The whole initiative will help drive culture change in Whitehall toward an assumption of total publication for anonymous data using open standards. It will also promote international liaison and global standards setting as an investment in future international data sharing.

The announcement of this new initiative was made in the House of Commons yesterday (Wednesday 9 June), by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as part of a wider statement on constitutional reform: 'So that Government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who led the creation of the World Wide Web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data on the Web over the coming months,' he said.

The new panel of experts will work closely with the recently-appointed Director for Digital Engagement and other officials in the Cabinet Office, the Office for Public Sector Information (part of The National Archives), and the Technology Strategy Board.

Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee are both Professors in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and founder directors of the Web Science Research Initiative. Professor Shadbolt was Director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) programme, a £7.5M project which was particularly influential in establishing the viability and value of web-based semantic technologies. He has recently been awarded a further £2.3m by the EPSRC to build on this work. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) began to explore the use of this approach within Government in a pilot project (AKTive PSI) which laid the foundation for this latest initiative.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been a strong proponent of better access to all forms of government data. Speaking in March to TED, he said: 'What you find if you deal with people in government departments is that they hug their database, hold it really close, so that they can build a beautiful website to present it.

'I would like to suggest: sure, make a beautiful website, but first, give us – all of us – the unadulterated data. We have to ask for raw data now.'

Nigel Shadbolt adds: 'The vision is that citizens, consumers and government can create, re-use and distribute public information in ways that add value, support transparency, facilitate new services and increase efficiency. We believe we can achieve this with the emergence of a new generation of Web techniques and standards.'

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

ECS postgraduate student Evangelos Mazomenos has been awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

Evangelos is a member of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group, researching ‘Detection and Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks’. The Leslie H Paddle Scholarship which he has received from the IET recognizes postgraduate research which will further the art, science or practice of electronic or radio engineering. The Scholarship, which is worth £10,000, will fund the final year of his PhD.

Evangelos began his PhD research in October 2007, having undertaken his undergraduate degree at the University of Patras in Greece. His research interests are within the area of wireless sensor networks, and include target detection and tracking, statistical signal processing, wireless sensor networks for medical monitoring, and network architecture.

He is supervised by Dr Jeff Reeve and Professor Neil White, who commented: ‘The award of this prestigious IET scholarship is a tremendous achievement by Evans. It will allow him to advance his academic studies and also to liaise with other researchers working in his field.’

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

Hugh Davis, University Director of Education responsible for e-Learning, and Head of the Learning Societies Lab, has been awarded a Personal Chair in the University.

ECS celebrates another first with the appointment to a Professorship of Hugh Davis. Professor Davis is the first person in the University of Southampton to achieve the double distinction of being recognised by promotion to this level twice, for excellence in both Education and in Research.

Hugh has been the founding Head of Group for the Learning Societies Lab since 2004. 'My research is essentially multidisciplinary,' he says. 'This is reflected through the broad-ranging research interests of academics in our group, and our collaboration with many different academic schools across the University.

'We have worked hard as a team to establish our standing in the computer science research community,' he continued, 'and I am delighted that my research has been recognised in this way. I am particularly proud that I have now been promoted in both areas of my specialism. We have a strong ethos in ECS that values and promotes education and research; this reflects the University’s commitment to student-centred research-led teaching. For me, collaboration and teamwork is essential for success. I see this as well-deserved recognition for the hard work of all my colleagues and researchers across our research group.

'The way in which technologies impact on society, and particularly education, is an increasingly hot topic for public debate. Funding councils across the UK contribute to the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) which commits tens of millions of pounds annually to research, services and content to support education, and I have been fortunate in being closely involved in developing the strategic direction of this investment through my participation on the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee. I will now be investing energy into establishing technology-enhanced learning as a mainstream topic of study and research.'

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, commented: 'This is another first class achievement for ECS. Hugh has established and developed a thriving and dynamic research group at the same time that he has made significant contributions to the development of education agendas across the University. I heartily congratulate him on his success which reflects the equal value we place on research and education.'

Professor Davis became a University Director of Education in 2005. In 2005 he and a team of colleagues were awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s award for teaching and learning for innovations in the Computer Science Curriculum. Hugh is also chair of the University’s Wine Club and studying part-time for a Diploma in Wine, so he will no doubt be celebrating his promotion in style!

A portable test to enable fast scientific online assessment of hand function has just been launched by academics at the University of Southampton.

After several years' development, Dr Cheryl Metcalf of the University's School of Health Sciences, working with the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has launched SHAP, the Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure.

SHAP is a test which contains 26 activity tasks (such as opening jars and pouring from cartons) in order to enable an assessment of hand function.

The idea is that individuals can undertake the tasks in the test through the web site and use the online assessment tool to enter their times and receive an assessment of hand function.

'SHAP is providing a modern forum and a much more customer-focused way of approaching hand function assessment,’ said Dr Metcalf. 'This is the first test that has an interactive online presence which is easy to use and means that people don't have to study maths equations - they just enter their times and get their scores.’

The original SHAP kit was validated at the University in 2002. Originally developed to assess the effectiveness of upper limb prostheses, an area in which ECS has a strong research interest, the SHAP has now been applied to assessments of musculoskeletal and neurological impairment, with further trials expected on users of prosthetics in the next year.

Over 150 final-year students received their degree results today, the culmination of three or four years intensive undergraduate study.

Results were published shortly after midday in Zepler Building Foyer, to an expectant crowd of students. The results of 20 different degree streams were announced today, with a particularly large number of First Class Honours degrees awarded to this year's Electronic Engineering class.

Read James Snowdon's blog to get the flavour of results day in the School.

Graduation ceremonies will take place at the University on Friday 17 July.

Synote, a web-based annotation tool developed in ECS by a team led by Dr Mike Wald, has been shortlisted for the EUNIS Dørup E-learning Award 2009.

Synote makes multimedia resources easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users through the creation of notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of the recording.

Although multimedia has become technically easier to create (e.g. recording lectures) and users can easily bookmark, search, link to, or tag the WHOLE of a podcast or video recording available on the web, without Synote they cannot easily find or associate their notes or resources with PART of that recording. As an analogy, users would clearly find a text book difficult to use if it had no contents page, index or page numbers.

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. Synote enables learners or teachers to read and search text transcripts and slides and replay recordings to support learning style preference, deafness, disability or English as a second language; to bookmark, tag and highlight and link to or from sections of recordings for indexing, revision, clarification or feedback; and to collaboratively annotate recordings with notes and URLs of related resources.

Synote is freely available for anyone to use and can play most audio and video formats on most browsers and computers. Evaluations have shown that students like using Synote, find the synchronised transcripts and note-taking facility useful and want more recordings and lectures to be available in this way.

Synote has been developed with the support of JISC and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

Dr Wald has been invited to demonstrate Synote at the EUNIS 2009 conference hosted by the University of Santiago de Compostela 23-26 June.

The concept of the humanities and technology working closer together will be endorsed by Professor Dame Wendy Hall FRS at an international symposium at the University of Southampton next month.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will deliver a keynote at InterFace, a symposium that will consider cross-fertilisation in both directions between technology and the humanities.

InterFace, which takes place on 9 and 10 July, will continue a tradition at the University of Southampton of interaction between technology and the humanities, and establish new ways for the disciplines to develop more initiatives together.

'Throughout my career, I have had the pleasure to work at the interface of the humanities and technology,' said Professor Dame Wendy Hall. 'In fact, working with researchers from the humanities was a major inspiration for the design of our Microcosm hypermedia system in the pre-Web days. I am delighted that the InterFace conference at Southampton is recognising the significance of interdisciplinary research between these two communities.'

The theme which underlies InterFace generally is how society and technology influence each other.

Issues to be addressed under this theme are the convergence of technologies such as phones, computers and cameras; social networking and privacy; how students use technology; and the exclusion of elderly people from web sites due to their inability to embrace the technology.

One-third of the submissions to be presented in Lightning Talks and poster sessions are from an international audience, reflected by discussions on machine translations for the Classics and the difficulties of switching alphabets, both of which challenge the Anglo-centricity of the World Wide Web.

'The fact that we have themes like this from an international audience indicates that we really need to seriously consider how all of this technology and information is used on a global level,' said Leif Isaksen of ECS, one of the conference organisers.

Another prominent theme is hypermedia technology for traditional media, which looks at the technology needed to read ancient manuscripts, with a novel idea being the possibility of digitizing all the surviving materials for the early Gospel of St John in Latin.

The conference reception on Thursday evening will be held at the John Hansard Gallery on the Highfield Campus.

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

Around 500 visitors will be welcomed to the School of Electronics and Computer Science during the University Open Day on Friday 3 July.

The School is holding a day of tours, presentations, demonstrations and drop-in sessions, highlighting the opportunities available on our degree programmes, and emphasizing the unique character of the School. Visitors will have the chance to see all our undergraduate labs, and to meet past and current students, as well as to find out about our students' excellent career prospects.

Presentations begin at 10 am with a welcome from the Deputy Head of School (Education), Professor Alun Vaughan; there will then be separate tours and presentations for Computer Science & Software Engineering; Electrical & Electromechanical Engineering; Electronic Engineering; and Information Technology in Organisations. These presentations and tours are repeated at 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm.

Between 12 noon and 2 pm the School will be holding a drop-in session in the Mountbatten Building, where visitors can see demonstrations, tour the labs with our students, see videos of our Careers Fair and student project work, watch our swarm robots in action, and find out more from ECS Admissions Tutors. Refreshments will be available; there is no need to book for this part of the event.

'Visiting universities is extremely important in enabling students to find the best place for their study,' said Professor Alun Vaughan. 'There are many factors which make a difference to the kind of educational experience that will suit a particular student and we urge prospective students to take advantage of these visit days to find out as much as they can about what we can offer them.'

ECS Open Day Hotline: +44(0)23 8059 4506

Further University of Southampton Open Days will be held on Friday 4 and Friday 5 September; places can be booked on the University Open Day web site.

View our Introduction to ECS Open Days by Professor Alun Vaughan.

The School’s new undergraduate brochure highlights the link between ECS undergraduate project work and the excellent careers prospects for our graduates.

Published to coincide with the University’s Open Day on Friday 3 July, the new brochure 'Create your Future@ECS, Undergraduate Degree Programmes 2010' takes the theme ‘A great study experience … leading to a great future’. Explaining the strength of our undergraduate degrees through the wide range of choices in the degree programme syllabuses, and the opportunities for personal development and achievement in our extensive project work, the brochure underlines the reasons why ECS graduates are in so much demand from employers.

Research in the School is also showcased in the brochure, with some of our recent media coverage highlighting the breadth and relevance of activities in the School.

The brochure contains syllabus and module lists for all our degree streams, and includes features on our facilities, our student societies, and our student bloggers, with a specially written article by James Snowdon on how to get the best out of university.

Read the pdf version or request a copy of the brochure.

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