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.

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.