EPrints, the first software that made it possible for institutions to create repositories in which to self-archive their research papers online, celebrates its 10th birthday next week during Open Access Week.
Open Access Week, which will take place from 18-24 October, is a global event now entering its fourth year. It provides an opportunity for the academic and research community worldwide to showcase the resources and benefits of Open Access (OA), share the yearâs new developments with colleagues, and inspire the ever swifter and broader spread of this revolution in the creation and communication of knowledge.
The University of Southamptonâs School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will also be celebrating EPrints during Open Access Week. ECS has been at the forefront of the OA movement since the early 1990s and was the first institution in the world to adopt an open access mandate (in 2002), requiring its researchers to self-archive all their research online. The School designed EPrints, the first software created for this purpose, which now drives many of the worldâs leading institutional repositories and is much emulated by other softwares.
"ECS pioneered the institutional repository, designing the EPrints software as a means of encouraging open access in 1999," said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. "Since 2002 when we adopted our own mandate, our repository has grown to over 4000 open access full-text research publications, capturing close to 100 per cent of our annual refereed research output."
In 2005, the School launched EPrints Services to provide training and repository-hosting services for research institutions across the world.
"EPrints Services has proved a great success," said Dr Carr, "enabling us to pass on the expertise that we have developed over the years and to help institutions to customise their own OA repositories for their needs."
EPrints is being developed to support emerging Open Data and Open Science agendas through projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). ECS researchers, including Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor Stevan Harnad, Professor Tony Hey, Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Dr Les Carr, have been at the forefront of designing and advocating these changes in scientific practice and arguing for changes in national and international scientific policies.
During Open Access Week, the EPrints team will showcase the numerous successes made possible by the software over the last 10 years.
Six ECS students received scholarships from the School to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, earlier this month.
The six students, Norhidayah Azman, Betty Purwandari, Jenny Lantair, Karolina Kaniewska, Carly Wilson, Rosy Ibrahim and Maria Apampa were accompanied by Jane Morgan and dr mc schraefel from the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group in ECS. dr schraefel was the only international speaker on a panel of women in Human Computer Interaction, specifically discussing the nature of women's research careers in HCI.
Jenny Lantair writes about the experience: "I recently returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference 2010 - it was quite an unforgettable experience. The conference itself is huge. Around 2140 people attend, mostly women, from 29 different countries, all of whom were students (960 of us), university staff or working in industry. At any point in the conference one could strike up a conversation with the women around, simply about how is it being a female in computing, job opportunities, or one of my favourite questions 'Do you offer internships'? So many wonderful companies offer well paid internships in the States that I shall have a hard time deciding which one to go for, they were all so persuasive.
The main benefits from attending GHC is the networking opportunities and the chance to hear a mix of inspiring and amazing cutting-edge women talk about their work and their lives, whether itâs one-on-one around the breakfast table, in a group at a workshop or in a crowd of thousands watching them upon the main stage. I found the chance to talk to women I would never have met otherwise really refreshing. Having a conversation with another woman and not knowing whether they head up R&D at Yahoo, are a lead researcher at IBM or just another student like you is quite an exciting experience.
For example I held a fairly animated discussion with two other women I assumed were other students (purple hair and dreadlocks are normally our area rather than businesswomen's) and it wasnât until later we talked about what we had each been doing that summer that I discovered one was the head of the Google summer of code project and the other was the presenter of an American podcast I listen to! They both gave me their cards and thatâs what I loved - everyone there is just another woman you can talk to. If I had tried to contact such people I would have had to jump through hoops, but at GHC an interested ear and some conversation is all that is needed.
The talks themselves were fascinating; what with the wide variety of lectures going on at any one point a talk could be found to suit you at any time of the day. Most of the day 9-5 there were nine different lectures going on ranging from security to industry, open source development to managing your own research team. If there wasnât something on that appealed for you or you had just reached saturation point on lectures, you could stroll around the tables and talk to a range of companies, from the NSA to Amazon. The highlights for me were the Open Source track which was a whole day of Open Source talks from a range of panellists which culminated in a hackfest. This was coding as a large group for a group called the Sahana foundation. This is a group set up to help manage natural disasters, with the larger goal of saving lives. This was a great experience since I got the chance to code with other interested students and we learnt how large coding projects stretching the globe worked.
A very inspiring speaker was Jan Moolman who presented a talk about using technology to end violence against women, whether as an aid to prevent the initial violence, ensure the perpetrator was arrested or simply as a tool to help the victim recover afterwards. It was a very moving and at points scary talk as some of the animated recovery tools was a mix of brightly coloured cheerful cartoons, the emotionless voice of the victim recounting the series of events and the brutal violence which had occurred. Janâs talk was very impassioned though and Iâm hoping to get involved with the âTake back the techâ? movement in the near future as a way to support her amazing work.
Finally every day there was a keynote speaker, all amazing women such as the CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz, Barbara Liskov of MIT (creator of the LIskov Substitution Principle and Turing award winner), and my favourite Duy-Loan Le of Texas Instruments. Duy-Loan was a brilliant speaker who was very inspiring; she managed to mix sparkling humour with her life story, personal advice for the audience and serious messages about what helped her and others become successful women. She really made any personal problems one had feel inconsequential with what she had been through and yet not only did she survived through them, but she grew into a successful engineer and became the first woman to become a senior fellow at TI.
After a tiring whirlwind of a conference we ended up at the Atlanta aquarium for a disco hosted by Microsoft and Google. It was a great way to end such an event and if any women (or men) are reading this and still arenât sure I would say go for it, itâs an amazing event (being held in Portland next year which looks lovely) and it leaves you feeling refreshed and energized about your work. Itâs a great way for final year students to meet prospective employers and get a head start over everyone else when graduation comes around.
Last of all I would like to say thank you to everyone who helped organise the scholarships this side of the Atlantic, especially Jane Morgan who made it such a good trip and ensured the rest of us could have an enjoyable time."
Researchers at the University of Southampton have been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant to study the movement of glaciers.
Professor Jane Hart from the School of Geography and Dr Kirk Martinez of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) have been awarded £284,612 to study a phenomenon known as glacier 'stick-slip' motion as it affects the Skalafellsjökull glacier in Iceland.
According to the team, scientists know surprisingly little about 'stick-slip' motion, the term given to the events which cause ice sheet movement, and occur in the normal course of glacier sliding.
"Due to the logistical problems of studying glaciers and the subglacial environment, we know very little about the process,â? said Professor Hart. "Until recently, it was assumed that glaciers flowed slowly and continuously, but there is a growing body of evidence that glacier movement can be episodic and can be modelled in a similar way to earthquakes as stick-slip motion."
To measure the âstickâ phase, the researchers plan to use an innovative wireless multisensory probe which they developed to use on Glacsweb, a project which deployed the worldâs first wireless probe to measure in-situ processes at the base of a glacier in Briksdalsbreen, Norway.
They plan to use a GPS and accelerometers on the glacier surface to measure the âslipâ phase.
"This research is significant because it uses the most recent technological advances in wireless sensor network research to understand a fundamental property of glacier dynamics," Dr Martinez added. "Environmental Sensor Networks provide a unique way of studying glacial motion and the associated responses of the ice and till. The Glacsweb system is the only glacial wireless system in use today and serves as an ideal platform to investigate new scientific problems."
The project will continue for three years and the data collected will be sent back daily to a server in the UK via the mobile phone network, and published on the Web for other researchers.
Professor Nick Jennings of the University of Southamptonâs School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has just been listed as one of the worldâs most highly cited researchers.
The listing, which appears today (Friday 22 October) on ISIHighlyCited.Com has identified Professor Jennings as one of the most highly cited researchers of our time in both engineering and computer science, and as someone who has contributed to the progress of science through his insight and accomplishments. He is one of only 20 academics worldwide to be listed in both categories.
ISIHighlyCited.com, developed by Thomson Reuters, is the first online community composed of and designed completely for highly cited scientific researchers. It highlights the top 250 pre-eminent individual researchers in each of 21 subject categories who have demonstrated great influence in their field as measured by citations to their work for the period 1981-2008.
Professor Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems. His research covers both the theory and the application of such systems. Specifically, he has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, auctions, markets, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation and decentralised control.
He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing some of the first real-world systems (in domains such as business process management, energy systems, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, and eDefence) and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering.
He has just completed 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 for emergency scenarios. This research will be further developed in the new ORCHID programme. Also funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with significant investment from the industrial partners, ORCHID will tackle the challenge of understanding, designing, building, and deploying systems that are composed of human-agent collectives (HACs).
Professor Jennings joined ECS in 1999 and has achieved much in the 11 years since then. He is recognized as one of the worldâs leading researchers in artificial intelligence and has attracted over £13M of grant income for his work in this field. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. More recently still, he was appointed as a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government.
Commenting on his listing on ISIHighlyCited.Com, he says: âI am delighted to be joining this prestigious grouping of academics who have all had a major impact on the scientific landscape through the take-up of the ideas and solutions they have presented in their published work.â?
Professor Sheng Chen of the Communications Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science is listed in the engineering category. His research interests are in Adaptive signal processing for communications, machine learning and neural networks, modeling and identification of nonlinear systems, finite-precision digital controller design, evolutionary computation methods and optimization. He was appointed a Professor in ECS in 2005, and received a Doctor of Science degree from the University in the same year. He has 244 publications listed the ISI database.
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Professor Nick Jennings is Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in PhD research positions in this group you can find out more information on our Research Admissions pages.
Professor Sheng Chen is a member of the Communications Group in ECS. If you are interested in PhD research positions in this group you can find out more information on our Research Admissions pages.
For more information about this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
The first community model capable of tracing the origins of computer-generated information is now available. University of Southampton researcher, Professor Luc Moreau, says that the new model will lead to better degrees of trust online.
The new paper entitled 'The open provenance model core specification', by Professor Luc Moreau of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and a community of international researchers, describes a new data model, the Open Provenance Model (OPM), designed to represent the provenance of information. The paper has just become available online at Future Generation Computer Systems.
âProvenance is a term used in diverse areas such as art, archaeology and palaeontology, which describes the history of an object since its creation,â? said Professor Moreau. âIts main focus is to establish that the object has not been forged or altered, and we have found that we can now do the same with computer-generated data. By understanding where data comes from, users can decide to trust data.â?
In 2006, Professor Moreau launched the Provenance Challenge series, an international, multidisciplinary activity, aiming to exchange provenance between information systems. It led to the design of the OPM, its actual use in the Provenance Challenge, and its revision according to an open-source-like community process.
The team have now developed a model which traces the origins of information and allows these provenance details to be shared between systems. The new model has already had some take-up by academia and industry. The next step is for a provenance data model of this kind to receive a seal of approval from the standardisation body.
âProvenance is well understood in the context of art or digital libraries, where it refers respectively to the documented history of an art object, or the documentation of processes in a digital object's life cycle,â? said Professor Moreau. âInterest in provenance in the e-science community is also growing, since it is perceived as a crucial component of workflow systems that can help scientists ensure reproducibility of their scientific analyses and processes.â?
The open provenance model core specification paper and full list of authors is available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21449/, and related specifications can be found at http://openprovenance.org/.
Despite disappointing national figures published today on graduate employment prospects, more employers than ever before will be attending the School of Electronics and Computer Science Careers Fair on 2 February 2011.
Over recent years job prospects for students in the School have been outstanding, with a record figure announced this year of 97.5 per cent employment for graduates of Electronics or Electrical Engineering, and a figure of 92.5 per cent for Computer Science and IT. The School has a strong engagement programme with local, national and international companies, and aims to ensure that all its students are aware of the opportunities available to develop their skills and awareness of career opportunities as they progress through their degree programme.
âItâs essential that we produce graduates who have the skills and understanding to play an effective role in developing future technologies,â says Professor Alun Vaughan, Deputy Head of School (Education). âAs a School we have worked hard over recent years to ensure that our courses are providing our students with the skills needed in the workplace. We also place a very high value on our employer liaison activity, including our annual Careers Fair and our Careers Hub web site.
âOur employer liaison activity enables students to work closely with companies who can sponsor projects and course modules, to take up summer internships and work placements in vacations, and to have the best possible information about employment opportunities.
'ECS students are very much in demand by employers for the breadth of their technical understanding, and also because the unique qualities of the ECS programmes ensure that our students will be able to maximize their potential.'
The Schoolâs 2011 Careers Fair will be held on Wednesday 2 February and over 40 companies have already booked places. To find out more, or to become affiliated to our Careers Hub, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
ECS graduate Ben Dowling recently co-launched a new company, Geomium, which aims to give users complete awareness of their surroundings, allowing them to find nearby bars, restaurants and cafes, events, local deals, and even other users in the neighbourhood.
Geomium â âLive Local.Live Socialâ, is a location-based service which has already been praised by The Guardian, and has attracted positive reviews from the tech media. It adds a real-time social element to data from established location review services like Yelp and Qype to create something new.
âWe aimed to make this social,â says Ben, âso users can see the events their friends are attending, meet new people at the bar they happen to be in, and see what people are saying about the latest bar in town.â
Ben graduated in 2006 with an MEng Software Engineering degree. âThe experience was invaluable,â he says, âand contained so much that has been of practical use.â He also worked in ECS as a research intern for two summers, which he says was a great opportunity to apply some of the things he learned in a working environment.
After graduating Ben worked for Mendeley for a few years as a Lead Developer before leaving to launch Geomium, which he co-founded with Michael Ferguson, an MBA graduate from Oxford University. Geomium was placed third in the TechCruch European summer battle, before launching officially in early October.
Geomium is the first location-based service to combine real-time functionality with unrivalled local content. For example, Ben and Michael told The Guardian on launch day: âIf you get off the tube at say Oxford Circus, you can see which of your mates are in Soho and which bars have 2-for-1 deals that night.â
Geomium is available worldwide, but the team are currently focusing their efforts on the UK. It is currently available online and on iPhone, and Android and Blackberry support will be added soon.
For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
We are living in an age of superabundant information. The Internet and World Wide Web have been the agents of this revolution, producing a deluge of information and data which has led to a range of scientific discoveries and engineering innovations.
In this invited talk at the Royal Society, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will discuss the technologies and challenges of a newly emerged Web - the Web of Linked Data, The Linked Data Web is driven by the release of large sets of data into the public domain and offers new opportunities for science, government and business.
Over the last 18 months Professor Shadbolt has been working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee to develop Open Data technology and policy for the UK government, including data.gov.uk His research is directed to the development of the next generation Web and the establishment of Web Science.
In this talk, which is part of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary programme, Professor Shadbolt will also address the challenges of the new Web: How will we ensure the quality and integrity of these information assets? How do we respect and protect our privacy in a world of increasingly interconnected data? And how will these fast-moving developments impact all aspects of our lives?
This event, at the Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, Tuesday 16 November, is free of charge and no booking or tickets are required. Doors open at 5.45 pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first served basis. The talk begins at 7.30 pm and will be broadcast live on royalsociety.org/live
For further information contact Joyce Lewis (+44(0)23 8059 5453)
Professor Nigel Shadbolt is part of the Web Science Research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in doing PhD research in this group, you can find out more information on our Research pages.
The need for more transparency in Web-based information systems has been highlighted by an academic at the University of Southamptonâs School of Electronics and Computer Science.
In a paper entitled 'The Foundations for Provenance on the Web', published in the journal 'Foundations and Trends in Web Science', Professor Luc Moreau points out that due to the complex flows of information on the Web, it is not always clear where information originates from.
âThis is a challenge since we want to be able to establish the exact source of information, we want to decide whether information has been altered, and by whom, we want to corroborate and possibly reproduce such information, and ultimately we want to decide whether the information comes from a trustworthy source,â? said Professor Moreau.
According to Professor Moreau, the solution lies in âprovenanceâ, a term used in diverse areas such as art, archaeology and palaeontology, which describes the history of an object since its creation. Its main focus is to establish that the object has not been forged or altered, and the same can be done with computer-generated data.
âUnderstanding where data comes from will enable users to decide if itâs trustworthy. This will also lead to a new generation of services over the Web, capable of producing trusted information,â? Professor Moreau added.
In his paper, Professor Moreau reviews several approaches that adopt provenance, allowing their actions and information flows to be audited, and their compliance with or violation of rules and policies to be determined. These strong capabilities - information transparency, auditing capabilities and compliance detection - provide users with the means to decide whether they can trust systems and information.
âA powerful argument for provenance is that it can help make systems transparent,â? said Professor Moreau. âOur aim, with the community of researchers, is to establish a standard method to ascertain the provenance of information on the Web.â?
A copy of the paper: Luc Moreau (2010) The Foundations for Provenance on the Web, Foundations and Trends® in Web Science: Vol. 2: No 2-3, pp 99-241 can be accessed at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21691/
Professor Luc Moreau is a member of 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, you will find more information on our PG Admissions pages.
For further information on this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
ECS research is playing an important role in an ingenious new campaign called Fix the Web, being launched this week to tackle the problem of inaccessible websites on a massive scale. Fix the Web is an initiative of Citizens Online, a national charity that campaigns for internet access for all.
The Internet has been a liberating force in the lives of many disabled people, opening up a wonderful new world of communication, ideas and networks. In theory, it should have created a level playing field.
Unfortunately, millions of disabled and older people are excluded from easily navigating their way around the web. To compound the problem, it is often difficult to complain about the offending sites. Fix the Web has been launched to provide a quick and easy way for people to make complaints. It also introduces a volunteer-led process for those complaints to be reported back to website owners to get fixed.
The reporting process for a disabled person will take less than a minute and is easily done through a form on the site: http://ww.fixtheweb.net, via twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem) or by emailing post@fixtheweb.net.
The new campaign incorporates the open source cross-browser toolbar developed to enhance accessibility of the World Wide Web by researchers in the Learning Societies Lab of ECS with funding from JISC TechDis/ The toolbar has been renamed ATBar and is available as a bookmarklet and download.
The development team of Sebastian Skuse, Technical Project Assistant Learning Societies Lab of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan have collaborated with 'Fix the Web' led by Citizens Online and funded by Nominet Trust.
There is now a 'Fix the Web' button that launches a report form that can be used to make comments about inaccessible websites. "Volunteers take the reports through a short process to check them and will then send them on to website owners, with information about web accessibility," said EA Draffan.
The idea of the toolbar has also been supported by JISC-funded OSS Watch who provide advice and guidance on the use, development, and licensing of free and open source software. The team aim to build a community around the project and take it forward through their recently awarded JISC REALISE project.
Over the last five months the ECS researchers have recorded over 1.8 million 'toolbar hits' on ATBar.