Synote, an innovative Web-based annotation tool developed in ECS by a team led by Dr Mike Wald, has won the EUNIS Dorup E-learning Award 2009.

The prestigious award was presented to Dr Wald at the EUNIS (European University Information Systems) 2009 conference ‘IT: Key of the European Space for Knowledge’, held last week at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

‘The judges said that Synote won because it is incredibly innovative and they could see that it brought lots of new opportunities for students,’ said Mike.

‘Getting the Award and having it presented at the conference is great publicity,’ he added. ‘Synote is freely available and we want as many people as possible to try it out.’

Synote makes multimedia resources such as video and audio easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture. ‘Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers,’ said Mike. ‘Synote actually provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording.’

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. Synote has a whole range of useful features. It 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 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 (Joint Information Systems Committee) and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

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

A new infrastructure that enables more effective scientific research by linking data in an accessible way has been developed in ECS.

According to Hugh Glaser of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who developed the system – RKBExplorer, it is an important step towards achieving Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web.

‘We have built a knowledge-based infrastructure that provides new ways of linking and presenting scientific information,’ he said.

‘It will be of particular interest to scientists developing systems that require exceptional resilience, where, for example, faults could cause loss of life, or impact disastrously on business or the economy.’

RKB (Resilience Knowledge Base) Explorer uses the Semantic Web to discover scientific activities concerned with building resilient systems, and at the same time identifies links and relationships between them. RKBExplorer then uses this Linked Data to provide access to the information in a user-friendly way, helping the user to build their own resilient systems.

‘Our system has the advantage over others in that it can identify indirect but potentially significant inter-relationships not only between people, publications and projects, but also between these and information about tools, components and training materials, and present them in an unambiguous way,’ comments Hugh Glaser.

‘Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that “Linked Data is the Semantic Web done right, and the World Wide Web done rightâ€?,’ he added. ‘We see RKBExplorer as a step towards realizing this vision.’

RKBExplorer was built as part of a Network of Excellence project, funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Information Society Technologies Programme. It provides a unified view of the Linked Data in many bibliographic sources as well as European-funded research projects and those funded by the National Science Foundation.

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

Researchers in ECS have been awarded funding to develop efficient test methods to improve the reliability of low-power computing systems.

The project team led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, a co-director of the Pervasive Systems Centre at ECS, and co-investigator, Professor Mark Zwolinski, also from ECS, in conjunction with ARM (UK), and Synopsys (USA), has been awarded £352,400 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The team aims to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in mobile devices such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and iPods.

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, computing systems used in hand-held products are extremely complex with millions of transistors of nano-meter dimensions operating with very low voltages to reduce power consumption.

A current challenge for designers and manufacturers is to develop efficient test methods for these computing systems which operate at such low voltages, so that any defects are identified after manufacturing and can be corrected leading to more reliable end products.

‘If we use existing methods to identify defective integrated systems after manufacturing, without considering the systems operating voltages and semiconductor manufacturing process variation, defects will be missed by the test leading to less reliable products,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi.

The new EPSRC grant will focus on exploring and developing new and efficient test methods capable of mitigating the impact of voltage and process variation leading to improved test quality and higher dependability.

‘This funding is timely as I believe our research findings will make a major contribution to this new research area of voltage and process variation-aware test technology, consolidating our group as an internationally-leading research presence,’ Professor Al-Hashimi added.

This research is part of the ECS-ARM Centre of Excellence initiative that began in 2008, and is directed by Professor Al-Hashimi, and Dr David Flynn (ARM Fellow), and a visiting professor at ECS. ARM is a market leader in the design of high performance, low-power processors for hand-held devices.

The project will begin in January 2010 and run for three years.

Another milestone has been passed in the new Mountbatten Building clean rooms with the commissioning of the ‘Spectra’ detector on the Zeiss Orion beam instrument.

The detector is the first of its kind to be installed, and measures the energy of the helium ions which bounce off the sample. ‘We are playing billiards with atoms’ said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who has been instrumental in acquiring the Orion. ‘The helium ion we fire into the sample is the cue ball, the instrument itself is the cue which fires the helium atom at the sample, and inside the sample it hits an atom and bounces off. Now atoms don’t come in different colours like billiard balls, but they do come in different masses (atomic weights) and by measuring the energy of the ion which bounces off we can tell what type of atom it actually hit.’

The reason this is important is that modern nano devices use extremely thin layers of materials, and this turns out to be a very good way to measure the composition of such thin layers.

The bump on the right-hand side of the graph pictured shows helium ions bouncing off a layer of hafnium oxide just a few nano metres thick – a few millionths of a millimetre – on a silicon wafer, which would be almost undetectable by any other technique. Hafnium is a rare element, but its oxide has great promise for applications in next generation nano-electronic devices.

In fact this measurement technique has links to the first detection of the atomic nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1911. He used alpha particles – naturally produced high speed helium ions – and observed them being scattered by sitting in a dark room for hours and observing tiny flashes of light on a screen.

‘I’m sure Rutherford would be amazed by modern day instrumentation’ said Professor Rutt, ‘but fundamentally we are doing exactly what he did, almost a century later, to help develop the next generation of high speed, low power electronic devices. Actually it turns out that Rutherford himself didn’t do much of the sitting in darkened rooms; he left that to a PhD student, Ernest Marsden; there’s a moral in there somewhere!’

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

A 'strikingly modern partnership of equals' between computer science and the digital humanities will be called for by Professor Willard McCarty in a keynote address at InterFace 2009 on Thursday 9 July.

Professor McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing at King's College London, will deliver a keynote entitled: 'Imagining the hunt: Cutting edge, collaborative, digitally human and reciprocal' at InterFace 2009, a symposium on cross-fertilisation between technology and the humanities, which will take place at the University of Southampton on 9 and 10 July.

As the title of his keynote suggests, Professor McCarty will ring the changes on the thematic elements of the conference - cutting edge research, collaborative work, the digital humanities and their interrelations with computer science.

In terms of 'cutting edginess', he will highlight the uneasy and uncertain effects of progress in the humanities. He will suggest that together computer science and the digital humanities nevertheless have the opportunity of creating a 'trading zone'. Both disciplines, he will argue, are well equipped in their own right, but each needs to understand the other’s ways of questioning and to recognise how its own questions can become in the other’s context daring, exciting and relevant - not simply useful.

He will go on to sketch a working definition of 'digital humanities' as exemplified in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. Nevertheless, he will suggest, there is considerable uncertainty world-wide about how to negotiate relations between computing and the humanities. Despite the fact that humanistic research has been done with computing since 1949, there are still no widely accepted institutional models for the digital humanities, hence no standard ways of getting computer scientists and humanists together. Close attention needs to be paid to what the disciplines on both sides want to achieve and how in each institutional circumstance they are to do that, he will argue.

In terms of 'reciprocity', Professor McCarty, citing Leibniz’s dream of uniting empirics and theoreticians, will argue that: ‘Changing what needs to be changed, this dream provides an appealing vision of wholeness for which humanists and computer scientists could strive – a strikingly modern partnership of equals, no one on a pedestal, no one calling all the shots. It seems to me that the contributions each [group] has to give to the other are sufficiently attractive as easily to make a strong case for institutional as well as individual action.’

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

Over 200 students will attend Graduation ceremonies at the University this week to receive degrees gained in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The students will graduate at two ceremonies to be held on Friday 17 July: at 9.30 am for degrees in Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations; and at 4.45 pm for degrees in Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering. The ceremonies will be followed at 10.45 am and 6 pm by Graduation Receptions for graduates and their guests, to be held in the ECS Graduation Marquee, situated next to Zepler Building.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, will tell graduates: ‘All of us who know ECS know that it is a unique place and that it is the members of our community who make it so. For the last three or four years you have been an integral part of that community as much as any of the researchers and teachers whose work contributes to the School’s international reputation.’

The majority of students graduating from ECS have already found jobs, despite the difficult economic conditions. It was announced last month in the results of the 2008 Destination of Leavers in Higher Education (DHLE) Survey that within six months of graduating from the School 95 per cent of students had found graduate-level positions. ‘This is an outstanding result,’ said Professor Alun Vaughan, Deputy Head of School (Education). ‘The fact that ECS students are in such demand indicates the relevance of our degrees and the way in which they enable our students to make an impact in the workplace.’

Congratulations to all ECS students graduating this week!

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

Wednesday 9 September will be a day of celebration in the School, when the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre is officially opened by Professor Ian Diamond, Chair of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

Around 200 guests are expected to attend the event in the new Mountbatten Building, to inaugurate the world-leading research in nanotechnology which will form the core activity of the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre. Guest speakers include Dr Larry Scipioni, Director of Applications Research, Carl Zeiss SMT Inc.; Dr David Williams, Chief Research Scientist and Lab Manager, Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory; and Dr Chris Winter, Partner, New Venture Partners UK. Professor Peter Ashburn of ECS, Head of the Nano group which will manage the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, will provide an introduction to the Centre’s facilities and capabilities, and guests will be able to tour the clean rooms in the afternoon.

‘This is a world-leading research facility, which gives us the best possible opportunity to take forward our world-class research,’ said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. ‘We have an outstanding building in the Mountbatten Building and our clean rooms are now fitted out with around £50M of equipment which gives us unique capabilities for the future.

‘We look forward to welcoming our guests, including research collaborators from universities and industry around the world, to see what we can offer them as research partners in the future.’

The day will begin with an opening address by Professor Ian Diamond, former Deputy Vice-Chancellor in the University of Southampton, who is now Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, and Chair of Research Councils UK.

To find out more about the opening event contact the ECS Nano group.

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

myExperiment, the social networking site for scientists, has set out to challenge traditional ideas of academic publishing as it enters a new phase of funding.

myExperiment has just received a further £250,000 funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of the JISC Information Environment programme to improve scholarly communication in contemporary research practice.

According to Professor David De Roure at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, who has developed the site jointly with Professor Carole Goble at the University of Manchester, researchers will in the future be sharing new forms of “Research Objectsâ€? rather than academic publications.

Research Objects contain everything needed to understand and reuse a piece of research, including workflows, data, research outputs and provenance information. They provide a systematic and unbiased approach to research, essential when researchers are faced with a deluge of data. ‘We are introducing new approaches to make research more reproducible, reusable and reliable,’ Professor De Roure said. ‘Research Objects are self-contained pieces of reproducible research which we will share in the future in the way that papers are shared today.’

The myExperiment Enhancement project will integrate myExperiment with the established EPrints research repository in Southampton and Manchester’s new e-Scholar institutional repository. With its emphasis on social networking, myExperiment provides essential social infrastructure for researchers to discover and share Research Objects and to benefit from multidisciplinary collaborations.

‘We are investigating the collision of Science 2.0 and traditional ideas of repositories,’ said Professor Carole Goble. ‘myExperiment paves the way for the next generation of researchers to do new research using new research methods.’

In its first year, the myExperiment.org website has attracted thousands of users worldwide and established the largest public collection of its kind.

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

In his final ECS project, Chris Shillitoe highlighted the fact that information can now be kept highly secure due to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).

Chris graduated on Friday 17 July with an MEng in Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and will now go on to take up a position in the computer security industry; in his final project he looked at the application of ECC to secure networks made up of small limited resource devices.

ECC is an encryption technique based on elliptic curve theory that can be used to create cryptographic functions with a faster, smaller, and more efficient resource footprint. Because ECC helps to establish equivalent security with lower computing power and battery resource usage, it is becoming widely used for mobile applications.

Through his review, Chris found that in the last few years, ECC can be implemented successfully on limited resource devices such as sensor networks, Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and identity cards, to make them secure.

'This will allow new areas to open up while keeping them highly secure,' said Chris. 'ECC has moved from being an academic's toy to being a definitive solution for the future.'

According to Chris, this means that, for example, doctors will be able to monitor the health of their patients from a distance through sensor networks without that information becoming available to any other party, and systems can be miniaturised and made more secure.

'By having reliable, high security protocols available, researchers can create and develop new implementations of wireless networks and RFID tags that would have previously been impossible due to the high resource demands that current security methods would have placed on the system,’ Chris added.

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

Microfluidic fuel cells could provide the necessary energy to continuously power remote sensors, mobile phones and laptops, according to an ECS student who graduated last Friday (17 July).

Microfluidics deals with the behaviour, precise control and manipulation of fluids that are geometrically constrained to a small, typically sub-millimeter, scale.

As part of his final-year project, Daniel Spencer, who received First Class Honours for the MEng course in Electronic Engineering at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, conducted a literature review to look at how energy harvesting devices or an energy store could be provided so that portable electronic devices could have continuous power on demand. His supervisor was Professor Hywel Morgan, Professor of Bioelectronics at in the School.

'Currently, since energy harvesting cannot provide the necessary energy continuously, energy must be stored,' Daniel said. 'This is usually in the form of batteries which provide electricity on demand. However as portable devices become more powerful, higher capacity energy storage solutions are required.'

According to Daniel, microfluidic cells offer a solution to this problem, utilising the chemical bond energy stores in fuels with high calorific values such as methanol.

A fuel cell is capable of converting chemical energy from a fuel into electric energy. The simplest device, a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell uses the electrochemical reaction of a fuel and oxidant to generate an electric current.

Daniel's research has revealed that more work is needed for integration of fuel cells into a complete system and he plans to do a PhD in Microfluidics to develop his research further. In the meantime, Sharp Corporation is currently deploying a Direct Methanol Fuel Cell system, the timescale for which is unknown.

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