Over 220 prospective students and parents visited the School last week on the University of Southampton autumn open days.

The students and parents were able to hear subject presentations, tour the School and the labs, hear a lecture on robotics in ECS and talk to staff and students at our drop-in session.

While those prospective students will be applying to enter the School in 2011 or 2012, preparations are now advanced for the arrival of 266 new undergraduate students in Computer Science, IT in Organisations, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Engineering and Electronic Engineering.

The JumpStart Induction Week, organized by final-year students Darius Aliabadi and Ash Browning, takes place between 27 September and 1 October and aims to ensure that new students settle into the School, University, and Southampton as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

In addition to new undergraduate students, the School will also be welcoming over 300 new MSc students, taking one of 11 intensive one-year postgraduate courses, including the new MSc programme in Energy and Sustainability with Electrical Power Engineering. The MSc students also have their own JumpStart programme, including a boat trip on Southampton Water.

‘We have a great week of events planned,’ said Darius, ‘ranging from formal and informal presentations, to competitions, social events, free food and lots more. JumpStart is a great way for students to acclimatize to their new environment and especially to get to know their tutor group before the work starts.’

The School's official student society - ECSS, Electronics and Computer Science Society, also plays a large part in the organization of the JumpStart week, hosting its own events as a prelude to its busy programme of talks, careers events and socials, which take place throughout the year.

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

As part of the Royal Society’s 350 anniversary celebrations a two-day discussion meeting on Web Science will take place in London on 27 and 28 September. The Royal Society discussion meetings address the major scientific questions of the 21st century, aiming to identify and map out vital subjects that will help set the agenda for future generations of scientists.

‘Web Science: A New Frontier’ is organized by Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Professor James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Professor Bill Dutton of the University of Oxford.

Professors Shadbolt, Hall and Hendler are all Directors of the Web Science Trust, which was established in 2009 to advance education and research in Web Science for the public benefit.

The Royal Society meeting will address pertinent questions. The World Wide Web has changed almost every aspect of modern life. It touches us all. The Web's billions of pages, links and other resources comprise the largest information fabric in the history of humanity. Yet the Web is rarely approached as an object of scientific study.

What processes have driven the Web's growth, and will they persist? How does large-scale structure emerge from a simple set of protocols? How does the Web work as a socio-technical system? What drives the viral uptake of certain Web phenomena? What might fragment the Web? The interdisciplinary meeting will discuss these and other issues as it presents the components of a Science of the Web.

Although registration for the event has now closed, those who want to join in the event will be able to do so through a live webcast on RoyalSociety.tv The majority of the presentations will then be available to view on demand at RoyalSociety.tv with slides approximately three weeks after the meeting end.

During the live webcast, viewers will be encouraged to interact with the discussion meeting using Twitter hash tag #RSWebSci. Bill Thompson will be acting as a special Twitter chair, and will be posing some of questions that have been tweeted.

To be informed when the presentations are available, please register for the waiting list without ticking any days to attend.

Speakers at the event include: Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Manuel Castells, Dr Jennifer Chayes Professor Ramesh Jain, Lord Robert May of Oxford, Professor David Karger, Dr Anne-Marie Kermarrec. Professor Jon Kleinberg, Professor Pierre Levy, Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Henrietta Moore, Professor David Robertson, Professor Luis von Ahn, Professor Jianping Wu, Professor Jonathan Zittrain

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

Engineers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science will unveil new technologies to improve communications in ‘danger zones’ at a symposium in Farnborough next week.

The outcomes of the ALADDIN research programme (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) will be presented at a final research symposium at the Park Centre in Farnborough on Monday 27 September.

ALADDIN 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), who heads the world’s largest agents research group, and funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It involves research groups in the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, and Imperial College London.

Focusing on developing techniques and technology to overcome the challenges facing different agencies involved in an emergency response, ALADDIN is considered a best-practice project by the EPSRC.

Over five years of research the ALADDIN partnership has developed new techniques for building decentralised autonomous systems in highly uncertain dynamic environments. It has made it possible to deploy systems of autonomous agents which can plan and reason and pass information to one another without direct human control. During the research project, the partnership developed three demonstrators which show how ALADDIN algorithms work in disaster response situations:

• A situational awareness demonstrator involving weather sensors.

• A disaster rescue simulation, considering how agents could operate and communicate with one another in a disaster scenario like an earthquake.

• A building evacuation simulator, involving the use of autonomous agents in a disaster scenario in a tower block or on a boat. The agent’s job here is to get people to safety.

“As the largest agents group in the world, what we are particularly known for here at Southampton is applying the research to real world environments,â€? says Professor Nick Jennings. “The ALADDIN project has developed autonomous agents which will make decisions on their own without direct human control and can then interact with other similar autonomous agents to get things done.â€?

“We have done some really groundbreaking work on the development and use of autonomous agents in decentralised systems,â€? says Simon Case, BAE Systems. “The challenge in practice is to detect whether the information coming from each agent is accurate or to be able to ascertain if it is not reliable.â€?

ALADDIN outputs have already been used in various customer communities, including weapon assignments, resource management in the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAV) sector, and more recently, for an instinct programme for Detica and the Home Office.

ALADDIN has won many awards, including The Engineer award for the 'best aerospace and defence project' in 2009.

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The ALADDIN project is based in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in this group, you can find out more information on our Research pages.

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

Over 650 students enrolled in the School of Electronics and Computer Science today, on a wide range of programmes critical to the development of future technological capabilities in research and industry.

Around 300 students enrolled on the School’s prestigious MSc programmes, covering software engineering, electronic engineering and nanotechnology, wireless communications, Web science, and Web technologies. Vishnu Nair, from Chennai, India, is taking the MicroElectroMechanical Systems course. He decided to come to Southampton because of its premier position in Electronic Engineering, but on his first trip to the UK he is finding the climate very different from home. ‘I’m used to temperatures of 30C,’ he said, ‘and am finding it very cold!’ But he added: ‘It’s really great to be here and the University Campus is very beautiful.’ Vishnu is planning to work part-time to help finance his degree programme.

Yang Tianran from Yibin in central China is taking the Microelectronic Systems Design course. ‘I came to ECS because it has a very good reputation in Electronics,’ he said. ‘I want to get a qualification that will help me find a good job afterwards, either in the UK, or back in China.’

The MSc students have had a week’s induction programme to the School and University, which included a boat trip on Tuesday on Southampton Water. ‘We are delighted to see so many students choosing the MSc programme in ECS,’ said Professor Darren Bagnall, Programme Director. ‘Each year, it gets harder to get on the programme and it is a great to welcome students from so many different parts of the world who want to do postgraduate study in ECS.’

Over 260 undergraduate students registered on the six main degree programmes in the School: Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT in Organisations, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering. Around 25 per cent of undergraduate students are from outside the UK/EU. 'We are very pleased to see such a large number of high-achieving students entering the School against continuing high demand for all our programmes,' said Dr Andy Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies. 'We hope that all our new students have a wonderful experience here in ECS and the University, and are successful in their studies.'

Around 70 new PhD students also enrolled in the School this week, with another 80 expected to register for PhD studies later in the year.

The University term begins officially on Monday 4 October.

A major two-day conference held this week at the Royal Society was a huge success for Web Science and for the organizers, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Professor Bill Dutton of Oxford University, and Professor James Hendler, of Rensselaer Polytechnic University.

A capacity audience, with thousands also participating in the live Webcast, heard a succession of distinguished speakers demonstrate the impact of the Web on all parts of modern life. Speakers also considered different ways of modelling the Web, and the huge value that the Web is bringing to better knowledge and information about communications, networks and social relationships.

‘It’s very neat that the Royal Society chose Web Science for one of its 350th anniversary events,’ said Tim Berners-Lee. ‘We’ve only been talking about Web Science for four years, and this event is a measure of the impact we’ve had. The auditorium was packed with people from all disciplines, talking about the Web from many different angles, and this is what we need to be able study the Web.’ ‘Web Science: A new frontier’ was one of a small series of events chosen by the Royal Society to highlight the important scientific questions of the 21st century during its anniversary year.

Speakers included Nigel Shadbolt, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bob May, Jennifer Chayes, Jon Kleinberg, Jianping Wu, David Robertson, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, David Karger, Pierre Levy, Manuel Castells, Helen Margetts, Luis von Ahn, Ramesh Jain, Noshir Contractor, Jonathan Zittrain, and Tim Berners-Lee.

Writing on BBC News Technology, Bill Thompson described the event as: ‘...a lot of fun and inordinately stimulating’. He noted: ‘As the conference progressed we moved from mathematical analyses to engineering, the social web and an exploration of the future of web technologies ... I first heard about web science three or four years ago, when I bumped into Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University and he pulled me to one side to tell me about his plans to model the growth of the web and how he believed it would help us begin to see the web as a complex ecosystem of humans and machines, worthy of study in its own right.

‘At the time I was sceptical, but I'm becoming more convinced that it is worth pulling together people from the many disciplines assembled at this conference and helping them to see how they all hold different pieces of the puzzle, and that the Web Science Trust is doing an important job at this critical time in the emergence of the networked world.’

The whole programme can be viewed on RoyalSociety.tv

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

ECS graduate Dr Reena Pau is currently featured as Woman of the Week on the ‘She’s the Geek’ web site, run by Rene Parker in Cape Town. The web site aims to educate and empower women globally through technology, especially mobile technology. The ‘She’s the Geek’ community provides training, consulting, guest posts, technology reviews, talks and everything related to women and technology.

Having completed her PhD earlier this year with Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Reena is currently working in the University of Southampton School of Education, exploring reasons for the decline in the number of women choosing to study and work in technology. While a student in ECS Reena founded the ECSWomen group in 2005, and she has recently taken over the organization of Theano, a University of Southampton group for women in engineering, science and mathematics. She also has an established reputation for her innovative work in outreach, particularly the Murder Mystery event held at the University’s Science and Engineering Day.

In the ‘She’s the Geek’ feature Reena reflects on how technology has changed her life: ‘I find that I can do so much more with my day with social networking and email. I couldn’t live without my mobile phone and laptop. I find technology empowering. But I need to make sure it doesn’t overpower me!’

She admits to spending almost every waking hour on the Internet: ‘I spent yesterday dog-sitting at a friend’s house who didn’t have the Internet. I spent the whole day thinking about life online. I took the dog out for a lot of walks to take my mind off it!’

Reena also stresses the importance of self-belief: ‘You need to believe in yourself. If you don’t, then no one will.’

‘I was very interested in Rene’s website and differences in attitudes of women to science and technology,’ says Reena. 'I found that mobile technology in South Africa was a real life line, as well as being a communication tool. It seems to me that this is a true example of how technology can actually help people.’

Three Professors from the School of Electronics and Computer Science feature in the list of ‘100 most important figures in British Science’ published in today’s (Thursday 7 October) Times newspaper.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, featured at no. 26, is one of only five women in the top 30. Eureka says of her: ‘When in 1977 Wendy Hall went for a job interview after completing her PhD, she was turned down because she was a woman. Big mistake. A pioneer of hypermedia and computer science, she has since published 414 papers, sat on the Council for Science and Technology and been appointed a dame. [She] has also helped to set up the Web Science Trust, which looks at the impact of the internet. She continues to fight for women in science.’

Professor Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, was appointed a Professor of Computer Science in ECS in 2004. He is also Professor of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eureka says of him: ‘The creation of an early forebear of the World Wide Web …may have been Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s first important achievement, but his insistence that such a system should be free and open to all was revolutionary.’ Both Sir Tim and Dame Wendy are Founder Directors of the Web Science Trust.

Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, has carried out world-leading research at the University of Southampton for over 40 years. Eureka says: ‘Professor Payne’s research on the amplification of light revolutionised modern telecommunications and enabled information to flow across the world. Today his work is critical in improving broadband speed.’

The Eureka list aims to identify the most important and interesting people in British science, ‘those pushing back the boundaries of scientific understanding, transforming our lives through innovation and changing our attitudes to science, each other and the world’, writes The Times Editor, James Harding. It covers researchers, inventors, engineers, communicators, policymakers and practitioners.

He adds: ‘…our aim has been to produce a list in keeping with the spirit of this magazine – in awe of science, fascinated by the future and convinced that our best hope of answering the problems of life on Earth lies in human ingenuity.’

All three Southampton professors in the list are members of the new Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences, of which Dame Wendy is Dean.

Dame Wendy said: ‘I'm just thrilled to be in such an eminent list. It is great to have the spotlight put on science in this way.

‘It's wonderful to see our new Faculty’s achievements highlighted so prominently in a list of the best in British science, and a great tribute to the support for research and scientific endeavour at the University of Southampton.’

A major new research project led by Professor Nick Jennings of the University of Southampton will aim to develop true partnerships between people and computers.

At a time when humans are becoming increasingly dependent on computers, the Orchid Project brings together over 60 researchers from a range of disciplines at the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR).

The five-year programme, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with significant investment from the industrial partners, will tackle the challenge of understanding, designing, building, and deploying systems that are composed of human-agent collectives (HACs).

HACs will become an increasing feature of our daily lives as mobile phones, sat-navs, sensing systems, and other electronic devices become more powerful and more ubiquitous. Embryonic and relatively unsophisticated examples of current human interactions with autonomous software entities include the crowd-sourcing that provides a growing element of our traffic information, user-generated content for weather reports, and our interactions with software that can find us hotels according to our preferences.

Professor Jennings says: “We are fast approaching an ‘era of ubiquity’ where each of us will become increasingly dependent on multiple smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us.

“This will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly interâ€?connected computational components (agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently.â€?

Professor Jennings, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, believes that human-agent collectives – people and computational agents operating at a global scale – offer tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help meet key societal challenges.

However, these benefits are mirrored by the threat of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to become increasingly reliant on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.

The Orchid Project therefore has ambitious aims: the researchers will tackle the entire lifecycle of systems composed of humanâ€?agent collectives, from the underpinning theory to the application of the systems in the real-world critical domains of energy systems and disaster response. In doing so, they will define the new science of systems composed of humanâ€?agent collectives, demonstrate the commercial, industrial and societal impact of such systems, and enhance the UK’s competitiveness in this key area of the knowledge economy.

Professor Jennings says: “We are bringing together three worldâ€?class academic groups with multidisciplinary expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, agentâ€?based computing, machine learning, decentralised information systems, participatory systems, and ubiquitous computing. These multiple insights will be essential in developing a principled science that will define the future development of human-agent collectives.

“We know that humans and software agents will continually and flexibly establish a range of collaborative relationships with one another, but their global scale and decentralised nature means control and information will be widely dispersed among a large number of potentially self-interested actors with different aims and objectives -some of whom may be humans, others may be software agents.

“For these systems to meet their goals, issues such as trust, fairness, efficiency, and stability will all have to be optimized against a background of potential uncertainty, bias, and ambiguity. Our real-world application domains of energy systems and disaster response will provide the opportunity to develop and demonstrate intelligent agents and explore how humans can work with them, how they respond to varying degrees of autonomy, and what incentives need to be put in place to encourage socially desirable behaviour.â€? Orchid continues Professor Jennings’ research in the ALADDIN programme, a five-year strategic research programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and BAE Systems, which developed a multi-agent toolbox across a range of data and information applications. Orchid takes this work into new areas of even greater significance and complexity.

“The breadth of our multidisciplinary approach, coupled with our focus on industrial applications, means that this research can be expected to be truly transformational,â€? adds Professor Jennings. “This enables us to build critical systems in the future that will be powerful but also reliable.â€?

____ This research takes place in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in this group, see our Research pages for further information.

For further information about this news release contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

Researchers at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) have won an award for producing an artificial intelligence that is able to guide scientific experimentation within a laboratory.

PhD students Chris Lovell and Gareth Jones today (Friday 8 October) received the Carl Smith Award for best student paper at the thirteenth international conference on Discovery Science, currently being held in Canberra (6 to 8 October).

The artificial intelligence, developed by Chris Lovell, mimics the techniques used by successful human scientists. The software, called an artificial experimenter, looks at the data available, builds hypotheses and then chooses the experiments to perform, all without human interaction.

"Experimentation is expensive. Scientists always want to learn as much as they can from the smallest number of experiments possible. The new techniques we have developed try to address this problem,� said Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner of the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group at ECS, who supervised this research as part of a Microsoft European Fellowship.

As well as learning from small numbers of experiments, the software is designed to question whether the data obtained is correct. "Biological experimentation can be error prone,â€? Dr Zauner added. “Measurements taken may not always be representative of what actually happens. Our system tries to detect erroneous data, so it can ignore it." The artificial experimenter has been used to characterise the response from a biological system. Currently these experiments have been performed manually in the laboratory, but the next step is to join the software with an automated platform that can perform microscale experiments, to allow for fully autonomous experimentation.

The lab-on-chip platform, being developed by Gareth Jones, will allow the cost of experimentation to be reduced further, by decreasing the volumes of chemicals required per experiment. When completed, the platform will perform the experiments requested by the artificial experimenter, providing it with the results obtained to allow the software to develop new hypotheses and decide on the next experiments to perform. The work has been carried out as part of a Microsoft European Fellowship awarded to Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, along with collaboration from Professor Steve Gunn and Professor Hywel Morgan.

"The artificial experimenter will provide a tool for scientists, which will not only allow them to reduce experimentation costs, but will also allow them to redirect their time from monotonous characterisation experiments, to analysing the results, building theories and determining uses for those results," say the researchers in their paper. The full text is available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21593/1/LovellC10ArtExpEnzRespChar.pdf

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Chris Lovell and Gareth Jones are undertaking PhD research in the SENSE group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in finding out more about PhD research in ECS, see the School's PG Admissions pages.

For further information about this news story contact: Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

Scientists working on biometrics at the University of Southampton have developed a new technique to identify people by their ears.

In a paper entitled A Novel Ray Analogy for Enrolment of Ear Biometrics just presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, scientists from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how a technique called the image ray transform can highlight tubular structures such as ears, making it possible to identify them.

The research which was carried out by Professor Mark Nixon, Dr John Carter and Alastair Cummings at ECS, describes how the transform is capable of highlighting tubular structures such as the helix of the ear and spectacle frames and, by exploiting the elliptical shape of the helix, can be used as the basis of a method for enrolment (the discovery, localisation and normalisation of the image) for ear biometrics.

Professor Nixon, one of the UK's earliest researchers in this field, first proved that ears were a viable biometric back in 1999. He said then that ears have certain advantages over the more established biometrics as they have a rich and stable structure that is preserved from birth to old age and instead of ageing they just get bigger. The ear also does not suffer from changes in facial expression and is fixed in the middle of the side of the head against a predictable background, unlike face recognition which usually requires the face to be captured against a controlled background.

However, the fact that ears can be concealed by hair led Professor Nixon and his team to research their use as a biometric further and to come up with new algorithms to make it possible to identify and isolate the ear from the head.

The new technique presented by the scientists achieves 99.6% success at enrolment across 252 images of the XM2VTS database, displaying a resistance to confusion with hair and spectacles. These results show great potential for enhancing the detection of structural features.

"Feature recognition is one of the biggest challenges of computer vision," said Professor Nixon. "The ray transform technique may also be appropriate for use in gait biometrics, as legs act as tubular features that the transform is adept at extracting. The transform could also be extended to work on 3D images, both spatial and spatio-temporal, for 3D biometrics or object tracking. As a general pre-processing technique for feature extraction in computer images the technology is now pervading manufacturing, surveillance and medical applications."

The research, published in a paper entitled A Novel Ray Analogy for Enrolment of Ear Biometrics, was presented at the recent IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems, held in Washington DC.

A copy of at: A Novel Ray Analogy for Enrolment of Ear Biometrics can be accessed at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21546/

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This research is being undertaken in the Information: Signals, Information, Systems (ISIS) group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking research in this area, you can find out more on our Research Admissions pages.

For further information on this news story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.