This year's System Design Exercise (‘D4’), sponsored by Detica, presented a particularly testing challenge to second-year Electronics students.

Working in teams against the scenario that they were part of a small electronic consultancy firm, the students asked to design a portable Mixed Signal Oscilloscope, and to build a working prototype in 11 days. Criteria on which the product was to be judged included features, performance, price, aesthetics, and innovation.

The teams were given precise specifications, for example, the device had to feature 8 digital channels and 1 analogue, have a graphical display, be portable and robust, and able to operate in the field. At the end of the 11 days, the teams had to make a competitive pitch for their design in front of the judges and their classmates.

The competition was sponsored by Detica, and Dr Matt Sacker of the Detica Electronic Systems Group and an alumnus of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, was one of the judges.

Pressure on the students was intense as they worked round the clock to design their oscilloscopes and build a prototype while handling other module deadlines.

‘The D4 exercise is all about translating the skills and knowledge learnt from the course into a practical design exercise, and therefore having industrial input and support in this process is invaluable,’ said Dr Geoff Merrett, one of the course leaders.

‘As an ECS alumnus (both undergraduate and postgraduate!), Matt is in a perfect position to explain the challenges and relevance of applying the skills and knowledge he learnt at University to his subsequent career.

‘Matt has fond memories of the D4 exercise from when he was an undergraduate and, during his presentation to the students at the final “trade fairâ€?, was able to explain how the lessons that teams learnt in both project management and “design-and-buildâ€? electronics will directly apply to their future careers.’

The winning team members were: Tristan Bogle, Avadhi de Costa Tom Dell, Adam Malpass, Bekki Robinson, and Miraj Wanaguru, and each received £100 from Detica for their prize. Course leaders were Professor Steve Gunn, Dr Geoff Merrett and Dr Rob Maunder, with support from Tim Forcer, Jeff Hooker and Dave Oakley.

Read Adam Malpass’s blog: ‘The most intense few weeks of my University life …’

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

ECS Electronics student Adam Malpass has won a prestigious Advanced Leadership Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The Award is part of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Best (Better engineering, science, technology) Programme, which aims to ‘recruit, train and retain the brightest and most motivated young people into and within the engineering profession’. The Programme also aims to build partnerships between industry and education, and to provide education and training opportunities that students can access throughout their university careers.

Adam received the Award after a testing interview weekend in which he and other finalists in the application process were put through a series of challenges. He is now able to access £5000 of funding over the next three years of his MEng degree programme towards professional development. Writing in his ECS blog, Adam says that he will definitely be visiting Japan: ‘Hopefully next summer I will get the chance to take an intensive language course in Japan, followed by a period working for some of the best research and development companies in the world! I’ve always wanted to go there, and so the fact that is it now tantalisingly close to becoming a reality is just fantastic!â€?

Adam, who comes from Buckinghamshire, has achieved outstanding results in his academic work in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, but also plays in the Southampton University Jazz Orchestra (SUJO), and is a member of the Student Robotics group, which organizes an annual challenge for A level students in local schools and colleges. He has also contributed to the ECS students blogs since he joined the School in October 2008.

With this Award already in place, Adam will be travelling to London this Friday (16 April) to attend the Target Student of the Year Awards, where he is through to the final stages of the competition for Undergraduate of the Year.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, said: ‘Many congratulations to Adam. This is a highly prestigious award and reflects great credit not only on Adam but also but on the School of Electronics and Computer Science. We are delighted to share in his success.’

Read Adam’s blogs

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

The final showdown for this year’s Student Robotics challenge takes place tomorrow (Saturday 17 April) at the University of Southampton.

For the last eight months young engineers in Hampshire schools and colleges have been designing, building and programming autonomous robots which will compete against each other in the grand finals. The college students, working in teams of six, have been mentored and supported by students from the University of Southampton who have organized this very successful competition for the third year running.

The challenge for the college students is to build robots that are programmed to complete a task. To do this successfully the students are encouraged to produce robots which are sophisticated, capable of programmed movement to perform set tasks, able to ‘see’, and make best use of their own artificial intelligence.

The University students design, build and develop all of the electronics themselves, ensuring that the competing sixth forms and colleges have custom-hardware tailored to their precise needs. Over the last two years of the competition the University students have managed to produce an electronics kit that provides lots of functionality but with the flexibility for the college teams to experiment and develop their own solutions. Each college team receives a weekly visit from a University student – many of them from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, to help them get their robot into shape for the grand final.

'The organization and running of this activity is carried out solely by our students themselves,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'We applaud their commitment to this event since it provides the sixth-form students with the chance to work on a real engineering problem, valuably supplementing their A level studies. Our students are able to develop valuable skills such as project management, team work and group development, which is very beneficial to their future careers.'

This year’s event will be contested by teams from Taunton's College, Southampton City College, St Anne's School Southampton, Brockenhurst College, Alton College, Peter Symonds College Winchester, Ringwood School, Bishop Wordsworth's College, Salisbury, Churcher's College, Bedales School, and the Sixth Form College, Farnborough, and takes place in The Cube, Students' Union, Highfield Campus, from 10 am to 4.30 pm. The robots compete against each other in a specially designed arena and gain points for their success in completing a number of tasks. The prizegiving takes place at 4 pm, with prizes being awarded by Professor Harvey Rutt.

Student Robotics is sponsored by the Motorola Foundation, austriamicrosystem, the University of Southampton and Student Community Action.

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

Researchers at the University of Southampton expect to have sensor probes which can predict the onset of landslides, by the end of this year.

Dr Kirk Martinez at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science and Professor Jane Hart in Geography have been funded by the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to develop fist-sized sensors to monitor erosion rates during California’s storm season.

The fist-sized sensors have been placed in Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico, an area which is constantly under water due to torrential rain and mud slides.

“Nobody has ever tried putting radio-based sensors into slopes before,â€? said Dr Martinez. “We are very close to having a miniaturised version that measures light, conductivity and tilt.â€?

A total of six sensors have been placed upstream from the Tijuana estuary, which is just over the Mexican border in San Diego. The probes take a reading every hour monitoring factors such as temperature and movement. “Our challenge now is to get them measuring more and to have them really wake up when a storm is predicted,â€? said Dr Martinez, who first developed sensor probes to monitor glacier movements in 2003.

“We are already getting very good signs that we are getting a sense of the changes in sediment and soil through the sensors; the next move is trying to predict when things begin to change so that people living nearby can have early warnings of storms and landslides,â€? he added.

According to the researchers, these sensors will be suitable to predict sudden landslides, particularly common in India and Asia and which cause mass devastation, claiming hundreds of lives and leaving millions homeless. They could also be used to predict flooding in the UK.

See media coverage in The Guardian on this project.

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

The impact of the cloud of ash over the UK has underlined how important it is for scientists to gain a better understanding of the complex relationships that exist between socio-technological and geophysical systems that operate at the scale of countries and continents.

Last year the University of Southampton set up the interdisciplinary Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) to address exactly these types of world-scale environmental issues.

"The difficulty at the moment is that no one can accurately measure the concentration of ash in the atmosphere on a large scale," says Dr Hans Fangohr, Head of the University’s Computational Modelling Group. "This is why we need to develop new ways to simulate the scenario so that we can better understand the spread of dispersed particles, such as volcano ash, in the atmosphere."

The ICSS’s incoming cohort of 20 Complex Systems Simulation PhD students will use the University's new supercomputer, which is among the 25 fastest university machines in the world, to model complicated turbulent air flow, amongst other things, when they begin their studies later this year.

By combining research expertise from engineering, Earth sciences, remote sensing and oceanography, their research has the potential to devise methods to improve predictions of the concentration of pollutants in the air, thus enabling key decision makers to determine levels of risk with greater reliability and efficiency.

"At the moment, the only way that it would be possible to measure the concentration of ash in the atmosphere systematically is to send out thousands of aircraft and fly them through the clouds taking measurements, which is obviously not possible," says Dr Fangohr. "Our investment in complex systems simulation and our cohort of students will work to make these predictions better in the future, thus ensuring safety and minimising cost and disruption."

Last 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," says Dr Seth Bullock, Head of the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and 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," says 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 systems."

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

Dr John-David ‘JD’ Marsters of the ECS Systems Team appeared on BBC Technology News Online yesterday (Thursday 22 April), commenting on the latest version of the ZeuS virus.

In a story on the return of the virus, which steals online banking details from infected computer users and is prevalent in the online banking community, JD warns of the danger to computer users whose anti-virus software is not up to date: ‘There are plenty of opportunities for people to purchase access to these systems through underground chat rooms,’ he says.

‘It's a game of cat and mouse between anti-virus vendors and botnet developers.’

After the story appeared on BBC News, JD was contacted by BBC Cambridgeshire who then interviewed him for one of their radio shows.

‘I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to discuss this issue,’ says JD, ‘as I strongly believe that education is vital in reducing the growth of online fraud. Every time we connect a computer to the internet, there is a social implication. Every time someone falls victim to an online scam or confidence trick, others are put at risk. Learning to use the internet with care is something for which we all need to take responsibility.

JD completed an undergraduate Masters degree in Computer Engineering in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and went on to gain a PhD from the School, in Information Security and Biometrics.

He now works in one of the busiest and most high-pressured areas of the School – the ECS Computing Lab in the Zepler Building. Along with Toby Hunt and a team of ECS student helpers, JD ensures that students have access to a wide range of computing resources for coursework and projects, and provides a drop-in support service for all staff and students in the School. He also designs and builds information systems, like the one pictured which informs students which computers are offline or in use at any particular time.

He maintains his academic interest in security and has a particular interest in cybercrime and its implications for Web Science. He comments: ‘Education is crucial if we are to slow the growth in online fraud, and it is important that we begin to understand the social implications of connecting computers to the internet. We are only just beginning to understand the Web as a social phenomenon, something which Web Science research will attempt to tackle over the coming years. Nevertheless, every time we bring an internet connection to our homes and offices we should remember that we are inviting in strangers.’

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

As MailScanner, the world’s most widely-used email security and anti-spam system prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on 1 May, its developer has just launched ScamNailer, a programme designed purely to spot phishing attacks.

Julian Field, Systems Administrator at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science first developed MailScanner back in 2000 and since then it has been used in 226 countries and has become a world-leading email protection system; supporting more virus scanning engines than any other with over 1.3 million downloads.

Now, backed by one of the largest corporations on the Internet, Julian has launched ScamNailer.

The programme, which can be downloaded free, tackles spear phishing, a technique used by spammers and scammers to try to get an individual’s username and password, so that they can then send out millions of spam messages from their email address.

ScamNailer has compiled two lists of addresses which are commonly used in phishing attacks and from these it generates a set of SpamAssassin rules that detect the presence of these addresses, which can be used in MailScanner or SpamAssassin to stop the spear-phishing attacks completely. "The advantage that ScamNailer has over any similar programmes is that its backer has provided access to a list of phishing email addresses and websites much larger than any other available, so when people download the package, they can block these addresses from their own site," said Julian.

ScamNailer, which can be downloaded free, is attracting an average of three million downloads a month.

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

A system of computerised agents which can manage energy use and storage in homes won a Best Paper Award at an international conference on autonomous agents yesterday (12 May 2010).

The award was presented to researchers from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at AAMAS 2010, the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, which takes place from 10 to 14 May in Toronto, Canada, and was chaired by Professor Michael Luck of King's College London, and formerly of the School of Electronics and Computer Science..

The award was for a paper entitled Agent-based Micro-Storage Management for the Smart Grid, which beat 684 other submissions. The paper describes a system developed by ECS researchers, Dr Krishnen Vytelingum, Dr Thomas Voice and Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn, to optimise individual electricity usage and storage, in order to improve efficiency of the electricity grid and to reduce emissions. Having already developed agents that can trade on the stock market and manage crisis communications, the team, led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings, have now developed an agent-based micro-storage management technique that allows homes to adapt their energy use to match market conditions.

“The AAMAS 2010 adjudication committee described our system as an excellent example of bringing deep theory together with an exciting and innovative application that really marked this as an outstanding paper,â€? said Professor Jennings. “They said that it clearly demonstrated the potential of agent technology in this major new domain and should open the door for much future work in this area.â€?

According to Dr Rogers, who earlier this year launched an iPhone application, named GridCarbon, to measure the carbon intensity of the UK grid, this system will make it possible to install smart software into electricity meters. This will mean that the agents will be able to optimise the usage and storage profile of the dwelling and learn the best storage profile given market prices at any particular time.

“This approach focuses on the system dynamics where all agents in the system are given the freedom to buy electricity whenever they see fit and, building on this, they can then learn the best storage profile in a market place where prices keep changing,â€? says Dr Rogers.

“Another advantage is that if most homes in the system start using storage and manage to reduce peak demand, the overall cost of generating electricity is reduced.â€?

The ECS group had 11 full papers accepted for this year's AAMAS conference, which is a record for the event.

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

Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are key speakers at FutureEverything 2010 which takes place this week (12-15 May) in Manchester.

FutureEverything is an art, technology and social innovation organization that runs year-round innovation labs and an annual festival of art, music and ideas. This year Web Science features on the programme with two major sessions devoted to global networks and the science of the Web.

Nigel Shadbolt is a panel member and Keynote Speaker in GloNet, a new type of Globally Networked Event, which connects Manchester with Sendai (Japan), Istanbul (Turkey), Sao Paolo (Brazil), and Vancouver (Canada), in a series of specially staged events and forums. He will be talking on the of promise of open data and about lessons learnt in the work he and his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been undertaking as Government Information Advisors opening up non-personal public sector information.

"There is a real momentum around the idea of opening up data from governments, local bodies, cities and a wide range of organisations", says Nigel Shadbolt. "Making this data available on the Web will lead to new opportunities in the creation of economic and social value.

"A linked Web of data can make government more transparent, and public and private services more efficient and accountable. It can empower individuals in new ways. We need to anticipate and understand these opportunities. We need a Science of the Web to do this." Wendy Hall is giving a Keynote address in the ‘Imagine Everything’ strand of the conference, which focuses on the Web and our lives online, covering music, the Semantic Web, intergenerational communication, open source, and activism on the Web.

‘This is a hugely exciting event,’ she said, ‘bringing creative energy to the interface of music, art, and ideas. It’s a real honour to be part of it and to be able to talk about Web Science in this context.

‘Web Science is something that touches on just about every aspect of our lives and our futures and I look forward to the interaction and insights that FutureEverything will stimulate.’

Professor Dame Wendy Hall is one of the founders of Web Science and is Managing Director of the Web Science Trust; she and Nigel Shadbolt are both Professors at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Nigel Shadbolt is also one of the founders of Web Science and a Programme Director of the Web Science Trust. He is currently working with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to establish a new Institute for Web Science at the Universities of Southampton and Oxford, which is being funded by BIS with a grant of £30M over four years.

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

Engineers at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are working to develop prototype insulation systems that could lead to new high-efficiency electrical generators.

Professor Alun Vaughan, Dr Paul Lewin and Dr Gabriele Gherbaz of the ECS Electrical Power Engineering group are leading the University’s role in the €3 million EU-funded ANASTASIA (Advanced NAno-Structured TApeS for electrotechnical high power Insulating Applications).

The aim of the three-year project is to develop radically innovative electrical insulating tapes for use in generators and motors to improve the energy conversion efficiency of electrotechnical systems across Europe.

The team predicts that, at a European scale, a 0.2 percent gain in generator conversion efficiency could save the equivalent of 1000 MW (megawatts) which is comparable to one nuclear power plant or €1.5 billion. “The current insulation systems used in generators are old fashioned and are rather thick, poor thermal conductors,â€? said Professor Vaughan. “Our aim is to replace the current insulation tapes with new materials integrated with nanofilters to increase the ability to dissipate heat and withstand high electric field strengths.â€?

The team will test three different approaches to come up with a prototype that will form the basis for use in new power networks; the ECS team will test the electrical properties of the schemes in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory.

The other consortium members for this project are:

Von Roll Switzerland AG Alstom Hydro Laborelec-Electrabel Politecnico di Torino University of Montpellier 2 Institut de Recherche Hydro-Québec Nottingham Trent University

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