Nanobiosensors, which will make point-of-care testing in GPs' surgeries a reality, have the potential to account for 50 per cent of the biosensor market by 2020, according to an student who graduated on Friday 17 July.

As part of his final year project, Stanko Nedic, who graduated with First Class Honours in the MEng in Electronic Engineering at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) conducted a review of mainstream biosensors and compared them with high performance biosensors based on materials such as nanowires and nanotubes.

He found that modern biosensors used for medical testing are inappropriate for point-of-care diagnostics due to several limitations associated with them and that these constraints can be addressed by the use of highly-portable, cost-effective and high-performance nanobiosensors which can readily detect glucose and many other biomolecules simultaneously and with ultra-high sensitivity.

'The demand for nanobiosensors is rising fast in response to the increase in obesity and diabetes,' said Stanko. 'However, several roadblocks for commercialisation of nanobiosensors have been identified, most important of which is the need for low cost mass production schemes.'

Stanko's supervisor, Professor Peter Ashburn, Head of the Nano Research Group at ECS has just been awarded £1.33 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop a unique method for fabricating nanowires, so that blood-testing kits can be mass-produced.

The new Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, which provides one of Europe's leading multidisciplinary and state-of-the-art clean room complexes, will make cost-effective mass production of such kits a reality.

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

The School’s involvement in the BBC’s groundbreaking ‘Digital Revolution’ series was launched last week at ‘WebFest09’.

The day-long activity, organized by Dr Mark Weal, was aimed at developing novel Web-based experiments, producing mashup applications and building useful datasets to highlight interesting aspects of the Web and to help communicate these ideas to a broader audience.

The event, which was part of the Web Science agenda promoted by WSRI (Web Science Research Initiative), involved over 100 members of staff and postgraduate students from the IAM (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia) and LSL (Learning Societies Lab) groups and the MSc in Web Technology. They were able to provide new perspectives on topics such as the implications of music sharing, life without the Web, the representation of time on the Web, and personal data collections. ‘It was a jam session, where what we saw running through our hands were grains of ideas,' said Christopher Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, who spent the day working on the Common Eras project. ‘But,' he added, 'in time some of them will become pearls!’

The upcoming Digital Revolution series provided the catalyst for the event, and the ECS researchers were joined by members of the production team, including Dan Gluckman and series producer Russell Barnes.

Digital Revolution (working title) is a major BBC2 and BBC Multiplatform project marking 20 years of the Web, and exploring its profound impact on almost every facet of our lives. ‘We'd long realised the resonances with the aims of Web Science, and ECS's WebFest09 was a great opportunity to exchange ideas with web scientists and think about online experiments that might inform the series,’ said Dan Gluckman.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS are advising the production team and both featured in the launch event for the series, which took place at the BBC Media Centre in London on 10 July.

ECS has is now offering PhDs in Web Science through the new Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science, and this year also launches a new MSc programme in Web Science.

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

The power and potential of the equipment in the School's new clean room is now apparent as the systems begin to come on-line.

The capabilities of the new Zeiss NVision 40 CrossBeam workstation is demonstrated in this image from the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, which is part of the School of Electronics and Computer Science in the University of Southampton.

Dr Stuart Boden showed the new system’s power by milling the letters ‘ECS’ (for Electronics and Computer Science) into a regular array of pillars etched into silicon (in this case, an antireflective, biomimetic silicon moth-eye array). Dr Boden used the Focused Ion Beam (FIB) to mill away individual silicon pillars, each of which is about 150nm wide at the base. The procedure involved directing a focused beam of gallium ions on to the pillars, whilst simultaneously viewing the action using the scanning electron microscope (SEM) built into the system.

‘But we can do much more than carve out nanoscale acronyms!’, says Stuart. ‘The benefit of having the Crossbeam FIB and SEM is that we can inspect a sample using the non-destructive electron beam, decide which bits we’d like to get rid of, and then turn on the gallium ion beam to mill away only these parts, leaving the rest of the sample undamaged.

‘In addition, the integrated gas injection system allows us to direct the deposition of a variety of materials using the ion beam, so we can create as well as destroy. This versatility allows for fast prototyping of nanodevices before committing to large-scale fabrication processes. We can also make nanoscale alterations and repairs to existing devices.’

The Southampton Nanofabrication Centre is managed by the ECS Nano research group and based in the new Mountbatten Building, which is a £100M investment in UK nanotechnology and photonics.

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

ECS researchers and biologists at the University have used the combined power of computing resources within the institution to develop software which provides a better understanding of how viruses evolve.

Researchers from OMII-UK, an organisation based at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science and a team from the School of Biological Sciences worked together to try to better understand viruses using the latest e-Research techniques.

Dr Richard Edwards, Head of the Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution Group, who studies how proteins interact and is particularly interested in short, linear motifs - known as SLiMs - worked with OMII-UK to extend his successful software SLiMFinder, a system which compares viral and human proteins and allows biologists to understand both forms better.

‘A protein can be thought of as a sequence of amino acids, like beads on a string,’ explains Dr Edwards. ‘SLiMs consist of about three-to-five specific amino acids in the protein and could be responsible for the signalling pathways between many proteins, because they control the ways in which proteins interact. They are potentially useful to viruses too. They are small so it is relatively easy for a virus to evolve a structure that mimics them, and hijack the signalling pathway controlled by the SLiM.’

As a result of his studies, Dr Edwards wrote SLiMFinder which predicts the SLiMs responsible for specific protein interactions (including those used by viruses to manipulate their hosts). This collaboration focused on the creation of a workflow for SLiMFinder, which used OMII-UK’s very successful Taverna software. This allows the automation of repetitive tasks, such as data collection from databases, or data manipulation, and provides a user-friendly interface. Development of the software was funded by the Engage project, which brings together the software expertise of OMII-UK and the infrastructure of the National Grid Service to help researchers around the country adopt e-Research techniques.

‘This superior ease of use, combined with faster execution times, is helping to make SLiMFinder into a tool that could be of great interest throughout biological sciences,’ said Dr Edwards.

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

A unique ECS research facility will be featured in the first programme in an important new BBC science series.

Bang goes the Theory, which begins its first run on Monday 27 July at 7.30 pm on BBC One, will explore the science behind a new biometric – the way we walk - by visiting the world’s only biometrics tunnel, which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. The tunnel is a special research facility built to advance the research of Professor Mark Nixon and Dr John Carter of the ISIS (Information: Systems, Images, Signals) group.

The ECS biometrics tunnel provides the technology to analyse the way people walk as a unique identifier. The colour keying of blue and green squares ensures full image capture, with eight strategically placed cameras filming the movement of an individual as they walk through. The data is then recreated digitally using sophisticated software which enables unique walking patterns to be characterized and recorded on a database and matched to CCTV footage.

The presenters of the new show, Dallas Campbell and Liz Bonnin (pictured here with Professor Nixon) will be demonstrating how our walks can provide clues to our identity as we progress through public places such as airports, shopping centres, or sports venues.

Professor Nixon's group is well known for its pioneering role in the development of new biometrics: ‘We started out by realizing that people could be recognised by their faces and then by their gait - the way that they walk,’ said Mark Nixon. ‘Now we are finding that we can break that down further into the exact components that provide most recognition; in our gait research we are finding that it's not always the parts that move that provide us with the most information.'

Bang goes the Theory is a new venture for BBC One which aims to bring science to a mainstream family audience in the heart of the peak-time schedule.

WATCH THE EPISODE ON BBC iPLAYER

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

ECS students will have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with leading, state-of-the-art co-verification solutions, as a result of the EVE University Connections Program.

The University of Southampton has become a member of the Program, enabling the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) to take delivery of EVE’s hardware/software co-verification solutions. ECS will use the ZeBu-UF University Bundle for system-on-chip (SoC) design teaching and research programs. The bundle includes the hardware emulator, zFAST fast synthesis with support for VHDL and Verilog, the zTIDE simulation environment to develop synthesizable transactors, a ZEMI-3 custom transactor compiler license and validation intellectual property (IP).

Sandra Larrabee, manager of the EVE University Connections Program, commented: 'The addition of the University of Southampton expands our reach into universities worldwide for teaching and research. Welcoming the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton to our program puts EVE one step closer to obtaining our goal to touch the academic world, especially with Southampton’s global reputation and large research and student populations.'

Professor Mark Zwolinski of ECS and Dr Matthew Swabey, Teaching Fellow, explained: 'EVE is the world-class vendor of emulation technologies. Its ZeBu will enable our students to learn how to prototype very large digital systems, further enhancing our teaching. It is especially applicable for our teaching and research on novel numerical System-on-Chip co-processors based around cores from ARM, IBM and OpenSPARC.'

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

A new report authored by ECS academics proposes using Semantic Web Technologies to link higher and further education learning and teaching repositories in the UK and calls for the technology to be used now.

The Semantic Technologies in Learning and Teaching Report, which was compiled by academics at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) looked at the existing or potential use of Semantic Web Technologies in the UK education system and proposed means of linking them up.

Semantic Technologies are designed to extend the capabilities of information on the Web and link information in meaningful ways. The authors of the report believe that these capabilities can address higher and further education challenges, such as student retention, curriculum alignment and support for critical thinking.

The report, which distinguishes between soft semantic technologies, like topic maps and Web 2.0 applications, and hard semantic technologies like RDF (Resource Description Framework), identified over 36 tools which are relevant to the education sector.

The surveyed tools can be classified as: tools for collaborative authoring and annotation; searching and matching; repositories and infrastructural technologies for linked data and semantic enrichment.

The researchers recommend that by evolving and disseminating deeper understandings of the potential for Semantic Technologies across the education sector, JISC can work with its stakeholders to establish and develop good practice which enhances the value of its investment in innovation and infrastructure in this sector.

The report sets out a roadmap for developing the identified tools for use in education, with an overall objective of the emergence of a linked data field across UK higher education and further education institutions.

‘We hope that this project will influence the research agendas and budget allocations of institutions in the UK and of the funding councils,’ said Dr Thanassis Tiropanis, one of the authors of the report from ECS’s Learning Societies Lab. ‘Semantic Technologies are available to us now and we already have lightweight knowledge models in institutional repositories as in internal databases, virtual learning environments, file systems and internal or external Web pages; these models can be leveraged to make a big difference in learning and teaching. Let’s start using the technology now rather than waiting for some time in the future.’

The Report was produced as part of the SEMTECH project.

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

A forearm crutch which incorporates sensor technology to monitor whether it is being used correctly has been developed by ECS engineers.

The crutch, which was developed by Professor Neil White and Dr Geoff Merrett at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science in conjunction with Georgina Hallett, a physiotherapist at Southampton General Hospital, is fitted with three accelerometers that detect movement and force sensors that measure the weight being applied to a patient's leg and the position of his/her hand on the grip.

Data are transmitted wirelessly to a remote computer and visual information is displayed on the crutch if the patient uses it incorrectly.

'A growing number of people are in need of physiotherapy,’ said Professor White, ‘but reports from physiotherapists indicate that people do not always use crutches in the correct manner. Until now, there has been no way to monitor this, even though repeated incorrect use of the crutch could make the patient's injury worse.’

The new crutch has been developed using low-cost, off-the-shelf technology and sensors similar to those used in Nintendo Wii.

‘These crutches will make it much easier for patients to be taught how to use them properly, and how much weight they are allowed to put through their injured leg,’ said Georgina Hallett. ‘This will help them to get out of hospital faster and also reduce their risk of further damaging an already injured leg by putting too much or too little weight through it.’ At the moment, the crutch is suitable for monitoring and training patients in hospital environments; the researchers have plans to develop a pair for use in patients' homes.

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

Computerised agents developed by an ECS academic which will negotiate the best online deals for buyers and sellers will be fully operational by the end of the year.

Aroxo, a new and unique marketplace that helps buyers and sellers for products and services to negotiate with each other, has appointed Professor Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), as its Chief Scientific Officer.

Professor Jennings is now working with the company to provide computerised agents capable of entering into automated negotiations for buyers and sellers who use Aroxo.

'I am really excited about this since I have been saying for a long time that software agents will have a real place in our lives and now it’s really going to happen,’ said Professor Jennings. ‘These are algorithms that we have been working on in abstract for 20 years or so and now they are actually going to be used in commercial business on a large scale.’

According to Matt Rogers, Co-founder of Aroxo, the new automated system currently under development will provide the first two-way negotiation between buyer and seller online. Matt said: ‘It’s going to be a Credit Crunch Christmas, so we’re working really hard to help families make the most of what they have. Buyers using Aroxo will be able to get a great deal and make their money go further, and our sellers get to grow their business when others are suffering.’

According to Aroxo, people are haggling more and more in shops; buyers show the shop the online price for an item and ask the retailer to beat it.

‘At the moment, online retailers can’t compete with this because they can’t negotiate with buyers to help them make a sale. Our system will enable sellers to use computerised agents to negotiate on their behalf while they get on with other things,’ said Matt. ‘All of Aroxo’s sellers are based in the UK, so this is really helping British buyers and sellers.’

The developers will make this service available initially online with plans to go on to offer it through mobile platforms.

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

ECS researcher Dr Alex Penn has been awarded funding to predict the effects of climate change on soil behaviour.

Dr Penn, who is based in the SENSe group (Science and Engineering of Natural Systems) in the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a British Council Darwin Researcher Exchange Grant to carry out research into soil ecosystems in Biosphere 2, the largest closed system ever created.

Biosphere 2 is a 3.15-acre, 12,700 m2 structure built as a materially-closed ecological system in Oracle, Arizona, USA, by Space Biosphere Ventures. The nature of the structure allows scientists to monitor the ever-changing chemistry of the air, water and soil contained within.

Dr Penn, who carried out PhD research on artificial ecosystem selection, says that Biosphere 2 runs many possible climatic zones, making it possible for her to look at the effects of climate change on complex soil ecosystems.

'This is quite a challenge as there are about a million bacterial species in just one gram of soil,' she said.

Over the next 10 months, Dr Penn will expose soil samples to long periods of drought and heavy rainfall, which will become typical conditions as climate change progresses, and she will monitor how ecosystems may evolve within these scenarios.

'Some ecosystems may be killed off by extreme conditions, allowing neighbouring ecosystems to spread,' she said. ‘This could have a strong impact on soil ecosystem function which is vital for ecosystem services that we depend on.'

Dr Penn plans to take the microcosms that are performing best and use them to emulate ecosystem evolution in a spatial metacommunity. This approach takes into account the co-evolution of the interconnected species.

'We already know of the significant effects if we expose soil to these sorts of evolutionary conditions in the lab; now we have an opportunity to see what happens in the natural world using new models of complex communities rather than our simple models of single gene evolution.'

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