Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a new social networking tool that users have described as not only improving reflection and awareness of their own well-being, but also raising their interest in others.

dr mc schraefel (lower case intentional) and PhD student Paul André, at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, set out to look at whether Healthii, a social networking tool which would allow participants to communicate well-being quickly and easily via Facebook or Twitter, would improve personal and group well-being and interactions.

'We’re really interested in what might be called "affective micro climates"' says dr schraefel. 'In other words – if we can see how we’re doing and how our peers are doing, does that give us better opportunities to see how we might enhance our quality of life at work?'

dr schraefel and Paul André closely studied 10 participants using Healthii over five weeks and their key findings were:

• Half of participants said they felt that their self-awareness increased, in terms of self-reflection at the time of the update, and reflection over past states • Eight of ten participants reported that their awareness of other group members increased (in fact as a result of the communications, one member noticed that her husband was ill, at a time she might not otherwise have noticed!) • Half the participants said they would really miss this level of communication when the trial ended.

'When we embarked on Healthii, we anticipated that people would use it to be aware of their peers,' said dr schraefel. 'What surprised us more was that they appeared to be getting a lot of value by doing a little self-reflection.'

Healthii enabled users to encode their well-being status into social networking sites and microblogs. The status was represented by four dimensions (busy-ness, enjoyment, stress, and health), and by choosing one of three levels (not, quite, or very) in each dimension. A Facebook application let users select their state (as well as view the group or past updates), represented by a graphical avatar or numeric code, and users could also update simply by adding the numeric code to a Twitter or Facebook update. For example, adding #healthii (3321) would mean the person is feeling very busy, enjoying their task, averagely stressed, but feeling a bit under the weather.

'The trial of Healthii showed that participants used and valued status expression both for self-reflection and group awareness. One participant commented he valued being made to think about how he was feeling, whereas Twitter currently makes him think about what value others would get from his tweet, or whether they might find it amusing,' said Paul André.

'In our field of Human-Computer Interaction, we’re used to designing to support efficiency or productivity in tasks,' said dr schraefel. 'That’s important, but we’re now beginning to consider how to design systems to support well-being while engaged in everyday tasks to enhance quality of life. We think these kinds of awareness applications may be a part of that.'

'Eventually, we hope to inspire designers and researchers not only to explore these attributes in social networking applications, but also to consider the potential for well-being measures across Human-Computer Interaction the same way we consider efficiency today,' Paul André added.

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

Professor Dame Wendy Hall will be giving the 6th Southampton City Lecture on Monday 30 November, on the subject ‘The Emerging Science of the Web and why it is Important'.

Now rapidly emerging as an important and vibrant area of research and academic endeavour, critical for our understanding of the Web and society, Web Science was launched as a new academic discipline in 2006 under the aegis of the Web Science Research Initiative to bring together researchers and educators from many disciplines, including computer science, engineering, the social sciences, health and the humanities to study the World Wide Web.

Professor Hall was one of the Founding Directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, along with ECS Professors Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J Weitzner. Many successes have been achieved over the last three years including the award of the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science to the University of Southampton and the establishment of a new global series of Web Science Conferences. The progress and achievements made in raising awareness of the importance of Web Science and in building the foundations and framework for the new discipline will now be taken forward by the newly-established Web Science Trust. In her lecture Professor Hall will explore how Web Science has become established, the insights that are beginning to emerge from it, and the major challenges ahead. 'The Web is a critical global infrastructure,' she says, 'with hundreds of billions of pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life.

'Little appreciated, however, is the fact that the Web is more than the sum of its pages and it is more than its technical protocols. Vast emergent properties have arisen that are transforming society, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As we seek to understand its origins, appreciate its current state and anticipate possible futures there is a need to address the critical questions that will determine how the Web evolves.' Professor Dame Wendy Hall, FRS, is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and President of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest organization for computing professionals. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at the forefront of the subject ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas, including digital libraries, the development of Web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web) and, recently, she has pioneered the establishment and development of Web Science. She has been influential in the development and formation of scientific policy, through many significant roles, and continues to be a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in science, engineering and technology.

Tickets for this lecture, which takes place at 6.15 pm on Monday 30 November in the Turner Sims Concert Hall, are available from the Turner Sims Box Office; tel.023 8059 5151. Refreshments are available in the foyer from 5.30 pm.

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

A team of academics and students at the University of Southampton have begun work on a solar-electric-powered boat which they claim will be one of the most sophisticated to enter the annual prestigious Solar Splash competition so far.

Team Tarka led by Dr Peter Wilson of the Electronic Systems and Devices group in ECS, comprises experts across the University of Southampton in Electronics, Nanotechnology, Solar Energy and Ship Science. They have come together to design and build a light and efficient boat to compete in next year’s Solar Splash event, which will take place in Arkansas from 9-13 June 2010. In order to develop their ideas and materials further, the team is seeking collaboration with local businesses interested in 'green' boats or buildings, aerospace, engineering or general manufacturing. In 2009 a number of companies sponsored key elements of the boat to a successful outcome, and the team is looking for sponsors at different levels for this year’s competition. Solar Splash is the World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating. The competition takes place over five days, with technical inspections on the first day and the remainder of the time occupied by five on-the-water competitive events, when speed, manoeuvrability and endurance are tested. Last year was the first time that a British university entered a boat in the competition. Despite having virtually no budget for the project and having to economise so much that they bought the boat's motor on eBay, they still managed to come in the top ten, winning awards for the ‘Rookie Team with the Highest Overall Score’ and ‘top teamwork’, ‘sportsmanship’, and a top three finish in the qualifying event, with the result that the team qualified as one of the ‘elite’ boats for 2010. “Last year, we managed to produce a boat which was simple and light,â€? said Dr Wilson. “This year, due to our new laboratory facilities, carbon fibre expertise and our advances in solar-powered technology, we can invest in a more professionally engineered boat aiming to be one of the most sophisticated solar-powered boats ever designed within the constraints of the Solar Splash competition. “Furthermore, this is now a University-wide team, with significant contributions from the world-leading schools of Electronics and Computer Science, and Engineering Sciences.â€?

ECS Professor David De Roure is one of the principal researchers in a new project which enables the online analysis of a wide variety of music from all over the world.

The Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project, which involves academics from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and international partners, has been funded by three leading research agencies to deliver a very substantive web-accessible corpus of musical analyses in a common framework for use in particular by music scholars and students.

The funding was awarded under the Digging into Data Challenge Competition and announced last week in Ottawa, Canada. The programme’s funders are the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada

This project will make it possible to embark on a significant exercise in musical analysis involving up to 350,000 songs.

'To date, musical analysis has been conducted by individuals on a small scale,' said Professor David De Roure, who is a Professor of Computer Science in ECS and a keen musician with a background in music retrieval.

'This innovative project means that the range of music analysed will be of far larger variety than anything previously done. Previous analytic research work focused primarily on Western popular and classical music. Our vast dataset includes a wide variety of music from all over the world, from many time periods, and includes folk, classical, contemporary, improvised, and live music.'

Over an intensive 15-month period, the team will use a set of algorithms and tools for extracting features from recorded music and produce an open source dataset for thousands of pieces of music which will provide a rich resource for music scholars, providing new perspectives and insights previously unavailable.

The University of Southampton will develop SALAMI with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. The US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has donated thousands of hours of processing time, and other collaborators include the Internet Archive and the BBC.

The first Masters degree which will train students to design future embedded computing systems will begin next year and is being run by the University of Southampton and European partners: Kaiserslautern University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at Trondheim.

The European Masters in Embedded Computing Systems (EMECS) is a two-year programme which has received funding from the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme; it will allow scholarships to be awarded to the world’s best students to study at any two of the three participating universities.

Students will benefit from the University of Southampton's expertise in System on Chip and Electronics, Trondheim's knowledge in Electronics and Communications and Kaiserslautern’s strong track record in Embedded Systems.

'This is a new Masters course in Embedded Computing Systems – winning the recent round of funding on the Erasmus Mundus programme,' said Dr Peter Wilson, of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group. 'We believe that funding for this Masters will attract some of the best students from around the world, who will benefit from the best expertise in Europe in the field of embedded systems.'

The team at the University of Southampton is led by Dr Peter Wilson, and also includes Professor Andrew Brown and Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group.

The closing date for applications for this Masters is 15 January 2010.

Those interested in applying should contact: Dr Christian Tuttas at Kaiserslautern University.

The ALADDIN project, which uses agent-based technology to tackle natural and man-made disasters has just received the Aerospace and Defence award in this year’s Engineer Technology & Innovation Awards.

The ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents For Decentralised Data and Information Networks) research programme is a multi-million pound multidisciplinary research project led by Professor Nick Jennings from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). It is a strategic research partnership funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which involves research groups in the University of Bristol, Oxford, and Imperial College London. ALADDIN focuses on developing techniques and technology to overcome the challenges facing different agencies involved in an emergency response.

At the Engineer Technology & Innovation Awards 2009 event which was held at the Royal Society on Friday 4 December the judges called ALADDIN a ‘stunning collaboration’ and one judge remarked that this project ‘truly captures engineering’.

Over a five-year period, which will end in October 2010, the ALADDIN team has used technologies ranging from computer modelling to automated robots to investigate how it can improve the understanding of constantly changing scenarios, to ensure a more effective response and improve the safety of men and women working in the 'danger zone'.

“This is highly complex research and we are delighted that its relevance has been acknowledged in this way,â€? said Professor Jennings. “ALADDIN has been an excellent example of how academics can interact with one another and with industry, in order to tackle major research challenges and see the solutions applied in a range of real-world applications. It really is the best collaboration and best project I have ever been involved with. All the parties have worked together, contributing ideas and solving really complex problems.â€?

ALADDIN previously received BAE Systems Chairman Awards for “Innovationâ€? and “Enhancing Customer Performanceâ€? (2008 & 2009) in recognition of the applications that have been built and transferred into BAE.

Speaking yesterday at No.10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced that he had asked Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton to lead a panel of experts who will oversee the release of local public data, ensuring that it is linked effectively across relevant agencies, authorities and government departments.

The Prime Minister made the announcement in the course of a speech which launched the initiative Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government. The aim is to streamline government by strengthening the role of citizens and realigning relationships in local and central government.

This new initiative builds on work which the Government has commissioned over the past year, in particular the advice received from Professor Shadbolt and Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who have been advising the Cabinet since June on the release and linking of significant public data sets. Huge progress has been made in this work over a very short time frame. It was announced last month that the Ordnance Survey would enable access to a large amount of their maps from April 2010.

The expert panel to be headed by Professor Shadbolt will include local government chief executives, IT experts, and entrepreneurs. The Panel will work closely with key and relevant organizations to help improve local public services and empower citizens, with its first meeting planned for January. Over a period of two years it will aim to advance understanding of why the release of local public data is important and how it can be used for the benefit of the public. The Panel will also advise on the development of the data.gov.uk site (which goes live in January 2010) for all public data.

Nigel Shadbolt commented: 'Making more public sector information and data available is crucial if we are to exploit the innovative talent available to us in this country to produce really outstanding applications that have social and economic value.'

He added: 'The commitment shown by the Prime Minister has really encouraged us to be ambitious and I am pleased to help extend this work into local government.'

Commenting on these new Government initiatives, Ian Douglas of the Daily Telegraph wrote yesterday: '...this short list of points represents a move from public data being hidden unless it can be shown that it is in the public interest for it to be released to it being public unless it can be shown that it should be hidden.'

Computing magazine drew attention to the positive effects on business of releasing data: 'The Putting the Frontline First report says, "Data can also be used in innovative ways that bring economic benefits to citizens and businesses by releasing untapped enterprise and entrepreneurship. Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt predict a significant increase in economic growth if more publicly held data are released for reuse."

The Prime Minister's speech is available on the Number10.gov.uk website.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is also a Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. Both he and Professor Shadbolt are Founder Directors of the Web Science initiative, which is one of the main research themes in the School.

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

The Southampton supercomputer, which will go live next month (January 2010), will enable highly complex computations in fields ranging from cancer research to climate change to socio-economic modelling.

The new supercomputer, one of the fastest in the world, built using IBM iDataPlex server technology and capable of over 74 trillion calculations per second, will enable the University’s first cohort of PhD students within the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) to do a whole host of simulations which have never been possible before.

This year, the ICSS welcomed its first 21 PhD students and is now in the process of recruiting its second cohort.

‘What strikes me about our students is their quality and the diversity of their interests,’ said Dr Seth Bullock from the SENSe group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is a Director of the ICSS.

Current students are set to use the new supercomputer to carry out simulations ranging from synthetic biology and neuroscience, through transportation and power networks, to glaciation and ocean processes, with one-third of them modelling some kind of evolutionary, ecological or environmental scenario.

The second cohort of ICSS PhD students is expected to be similarly diverse, and will tackle a newly expanded set of research domains, including socio-economic modelling of business, finance, and society.

“We want to help students tackle modelling problems with relevance to the real social world,â€? said Dr Bullock. “We are also seeing increasing interest in bionanotechnology as researchers look towards the construction of molecular machines and improved understanding of how drugs interact with living systems. The Southampton supercomputer will enable us to build and explore new models of these kinds of complex system.â€?

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

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and co-authors received the Best Paper Award at the 2009 International Conference on Hardware-Software Co-design and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS).

One of the world’s most prestigious conferences in the design of embedded systems hardware, software and tools, this year’s event was held in Grenoble, France. The award recognizes original research contributions addressing important and challenging problems in embedded computing systems which have the potential to establish new research directions.

The winning paper ‘A standby-sparing technique with low energy-overhead for fault-tolerant hard real-time systems’, by Alireza Ejlali, Bashir M Al-Hashimi, and Petru Eles, developed a hardware-redundancy fault-tolerance technique with dynamic and frequency voltage scaling and dynamic power management awareness to reduce system energy consumption.

‘It is known that hardware-redundancy fault tolerance performs better in recovering from faults than time-redundancy techniques and is often preferred in safety-critical systems. This improved fault-tolerance performance, however, comes at high energy cost,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi.

‘We looked at the problem of how to achieve a high level of protection against faults for hard real-time embedded systems with limited energy budget. We developed all the necessary theoretical foundations to work out the operating voltages of the primary unit and when to activate the spare unit of the developed technique to achieve the best possible fault-tolerance performance with minimum energy cost and meeting the imposed system deadline. ‘This demonstrated how power management and fault tolerance can be combined in optimized manner. It represents an important step towards development of the low power and reliable embedded computing systems required in emerging mobile electronics applications', said Professor Al-Hashimi. This work is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), under the EPSRC platform grant renewal (Electronics Design), awarded to Professor Al-Hashimi in 2007. This research is part of the international collaboration in Embedded Systems Design between Professor Al-Hashimi, Dr Alireza Ejlali of Sharif University, Iran, and Professor Petru Eles of the University of Linkoping, Sweden.

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

As the first term of the academic year comes to an end, ECS undergraduate students have given a resounding endorsement to their courses and to the quality of the student experience in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

This year the School has more student bloggers than ever before, who have covered a wide range of subjects in the 40+ blog posts posted over the last 10 weeks. The blogs provide a great insight into the lives of ECS students and their perspectives on study and coursework, as well as on a range of events and activities.

The ECS JumpStart induction week was a major subject of comment early in the term:

"I think Jumpstart easily captured the spirit of ECS-it's bizarre but you love it. You are expected to play hard and study hard."

"JumpStart is the first thing that hits anyone arriving at ECS. While it does count a bit for one of the modules, it's not really about the module scores, more the fun that can be had."

Other observations of new experiences have included life in the UK:

"All the food items mentioned by Enid Blyton actually exist and are as tasty as she made them sound."

"Cycling paths do tend to randomly disappear."

... the atmosphere in the ECS labs:

"We have our own /16 IP block [8], and thanks to its pioneering work, there is IPv6, which means Google dances for you."

"The atmosphere here is great: if you don’t understand something or are having difficulty everyone is really nice about it.

"I seemed to have accumulated a fast quantity of free stuff – particular food...I’m not quite sure how, but I must be doing something right!"

... the activities on offer in the School and outside:

"This Wednesday I have a yellow belt Jiu Jitsu exam which I'm really looking forward to. Hopefully if I pass, I will be heading out to the Hobbit (if you come here, make sure you check this place out) to celebrate."

... And of course, the pressure of coursework, project deadlines, and exams!:

"The work has started to ramp up a bit with at least one piece of coursework due a week. Most of the courseworks are just questions sheets, with some questions more fiendish than others, but one large piece we had to do this term was to build an electric motor as a team."

"There is coursework, which in this first term has consisted of building a personal website (that balances formality, with street cred, ahem... I mean informality), and extension of a graphical library, in Java."

"Discrete Maths is the most useful model when you want to show off. What have you been doing? I have been calculating the size of infinity."

As one of the bloggers writes: "It’s been one heck of a term …"

In addition to our first-year bloggers, we also had blog posts from our ECSWomen group who were at the Grace Hopper Conference in the States, reflections from Ian Gilham on returning to ECS after a 12-month placement in Madrid, and veteran blogger James Snowdon’s progression from undergraduate to postgraduate student.

There are also blog posts on work experience and placements on our Careers Hub.

Happy Christmas to all our ECS bloggers and we look forward to more in the New Year!

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