A researcher in the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science has just received funding to develop new approaches to data modelling and model-free data processing.

Dr Ivan Markovsky, who has devoted most of his career to numerical methods for data modelling, has been awarded a prestigious Starting Grant of€783,000 from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop his approach further. The (ERC) Starting Grants are awarded to excellent early career researchers to enable them to devote their time fully to research.

Dr Markovsky’s research has the unique aim of unifying and simplifying the growing number of data modelling methods and making them more easily applicable. “Data modelling is the only problem that is common to all areas of science and engineering,â€? said Dr Markovsky. “Moreover, models are often the bottleneck in applications. However, current data modelling knowledge is rather fragmented and repetitive.â€?

The central concept of his work is a mathematical problem, called structured low-rank approximation, which includes many applications and existing methods. “It is amazing that a diverse list of applications can be formulated and solved as a single core mathematical problem,â€? said Dr Markovsky.

A high-gain, high-risk objective of the project is model-free data processing, which bypasses the modelling stage and goes straight to the final goal, thus tackling the problem as a whole.

“Our research suggests ways to merge data modelling with model-based data processing, which allows us to skip the modelling step. This approach has been tried before but it is not efficient yet and needs more work,â€? Dr Markovsky added.

If successful, the research will have impact on applications in acoustics, biomedical signal processing, and bioinformatics.

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Dr Markovsky is a member of the Information: Signals, Images, Systems 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 Postgraduate Admissions pages.

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

First-year ECS undergraduate Andrew Cowan will be taking part in this weekend’s Design and Technology with ICT Show at the NEC Birmingham (18-20 November), displaying his prize-winning ‘Search and Rescue Robot’.

Andrew built the robot during his A level Systems and Control coursework at Sutton Grammar School. The large tracked vehicle for use in disaster zones has a wireless camera (with tilt, pan and zoom), and a collection of wireless sensors including gas sampling. About 20 microchips control all the sensors, radio links and functions (including lights, a siren and water cannon). Powerful enough to pull a car, the robot weighs around 80kg and is powered by two 750W motors. ‘I wanted to design and build something for my A-level Systems and Control coursework that would be challenging and complex enough to be my hobby for my two A level years,’ he says, ‘as well as building something socially useful.’ He financed the robot by negotiating sponsorship of parts with 12 different companies (whose logos appear on the sides) and used part of an Arkwright Scholarship.

Andrew entered the robot for the National Science & Engineering Competition 2010, and won both 1st prize in the engineering intermediate age category, and the Siemens Award. He was selected to represent the UK at the EU Contest for Young Scientists, taking place in Lisbon in September 2010 but had to turn down that opportunity since it coincided with the ECS Jumpstart Week! In July, he won 1st prize (senior age category) at the Young Engineer for Britain SE Regional Final, which has qualified him to go through to the Young Engineer for Britain final in March 2011. In September, he was also awarded a Crest Gold Award for his work on the robot (with the Crest finals also next March).

Andrew is being sponsored through his ECS course on Electronic Engineering with Mobile and Secure Systems by Cobham Technical Services and worked for the company over the summer at ERA Technology in Leatherhead. He is happy with his choice of ECS for undergraduate work: ‘Southampton was my first choice of university, not only because of its excellent reputation for electronics, but also because when I came here for interview the department seemed so dynamic and inspiring.

‘Perhaps this is because it is based within the ECS School, rather than a more traditional engineering department. The modern facilities in the ECS were also an attraction, as was the sailing at Southampton. I 'm now teaching sailing at the sailing club on Wednesdays.

‘The course, as any Electronics student will tell you, has long hours and is hard work, but I'm greatly enjoying it.’

When he graduates he will take up employment with Cobham, working in their Electronics Systems Unit in Leatherhead, on leading-edge technology for the design and development of antenna and wireless communication systems. His project over the summer involved working on the development of a robotic vehicle for detecting land mines using ground-penetrating radar. ‘It was great to put the skills I had learnt during the construction of my A level coursework to use in a commercial application,’ he says..

Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of when the World Wide Web went live on his desktop, ECS Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has issued a powerful warning of threats to the Web’s egalitarian principles – particularly from social networking sites and Government, and wireless Internet providers.

Writing in Scientific American this week, ‘Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality’, Berners-Lee warns that it is the Web users who might lose the freedom to connect to Web sites if, for example, social networking sites continue to block access to information provided by their users.

Berners-Lee believes that free speech will be the ultimate cost of business enterprises breaking up the Web into small unconnected fragmented islands and urges users to take action: ‘Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.’

Berners-Lee identifies universality as one of Web’s key principles, providing people with the freedom to link to anything, regardless of hardware, software, or Internet connection. He also cites decentralization, which has made innovation possible. Specific threats to universality come from cable television companies that might limit their users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social networking sites too are causing problems by holding information about their members which isn’t transferable between sites, ‘locking-in’ large amounts of data.

Berners-Lee commends open standards, especially improvements to standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, which he leads; he writes about the separation of the Web and the Internet, and about electronic human rights, including privacy.

Looking to the future Berners-Lee commends the use of linked data and the huge advantages it will bring to science and research. He ends on a positive note: ‘Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium; Director of the World Wide Web Foundation; Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Departments, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Over the last 18 months, Professor Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton have been working as Transparency and Open Data Advisers to UK Government, helping to free up central and local government data of all kinds, and creating the web site data.gov.uk

Professor Berners-Lee is a founder Director of the Web Science Trust, established in 2009 to raise awareness of Web Science and to build the foundation and framework for this important new discipline. The University of Southampton Web Science Doctoral Training Centre provides fully-funded studentships for the four-year MSc/PhD programme in Web Science.

See more coverage of this story.

A team of scientists from the University of Southampton, Royal Holloway, London, and the Institute of Zoology at London Zoo have been researching the social butterfly effect - studying how we change our friends throughout our lives.

They are interested in the fact that, despite the fleeting nature of many of our relationships, we often form cliques - circles of friends that are often friendly with each other. This could help us to understand why our society is made up of so many groups, from political to sporting.

The study looks at how we often form friendships with people who are similar with us in some way. This could mean having a similar profession, interest, hobby, religion or political affiliation. It showed how cliques form around common shared interests, such as being fans of the same football club or the latest pop sensation on the X Factor, or perhaps more pointedly having similar opinions on the politics of the Middle East.

The study, Stability in flux: community structure in dynamic networks, by Dr John Bryden, Dr Sebastian Funk (now at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London), Professor Vincent Jansen from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, and Dr Nic Geard and Dr Seth Bullock from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is being published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface today (Wednesday 1 December).

The academics attempted to understand how groups in society may be formed by building a computer model of a social network. Dr John Bryden explains: “This work is interesting because it's one of the first to study social networks where connections between people change. As online social networks have become popular, so scientists have increasingly studied human interaction using networks.â€? He added: “The study could have broad implications. Networks with changing connections are quite common in the natural world, from molecules to brain cells, and many of these networks also form groups." In the model, individuals freely form and break friendship links with others. "We changed the model so that individuals tended to form links with similar others and we saw the cliques start to form,â€? says Dr Funk. The study also went a step further, looking at what happens when peoples' interests change, for example someone might find a new interest or friends might influence one another. Dr Seth Bullock said: "It was fascinating to see how the cliques could form without any one person organising everything. We saw individuals moving from one clique to another. Over time some cliques disappeared while new ones were established.â€? Dr Funk adds: "It was interesting to see that new cliques tended to either fail very quickly or grow and persist for a much longer time, with very few in between.â€?

A video showing the Social Butterfly concept is available on You Tube at: http://www.youtube.com/SocialBtrflyEffect.

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Dr Seth Bullock is Director of the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation at the University of Southampton. If you are interested in PhD opportunities in this group, including fully-funded scholarships, see the Institute's admissions pages.

For further information on this story contact Joyce Lewis

Behaviour and morals online, including this week’s Wikileaks scenario, will be discussed at a workshop on 'Ethics and the World Wide Web', which will be held at the Foyle Centre in the British Library tomorrow (Thursday 2 December).

The workshop is being held as part of the British Library's Growing Knowledge exhibition, and is co-sponsored by The Web Science Trust, which was established in 2009 to advance education and research in Web Science for the public benefit.

The workshop will focus on the fact that although the World Wide Web is the most complex piece of technology ever engineered and has transformed almost every aspect of everyday life, little is known about appropriate ethical behaviour online. The workshop will try to improve our understanding of what that stronger ethic will need to be.

Questions to be explored include:

• Does the Web as an information space need special ethical consideration? • How has the Web changed our moral view of ourselves? • How do moral norms apply to artificial agents? • What are our responsibilities as Web engineers and designers? • What are our responsibilities as website managers and content creators? • Does the Web assume a liberal culture with unrestricted information flow? Can it be adapted to less liberal regimes, and if so, should it? • What norms of behaviour does the Web depend upon? • How should researchers approach open data online? • What is the public’s understanding of “publicâ€? on social networking sites, search facilities and other services? • What should researchers think about when collecting data, analysing it and disseminating their findings?

Dr Kieron O’Hara of the Web Science Trust, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), is keynote speaker at the event. He said: "The Web is a new space and we don't know yet what is right and wrong online. At the workshop, we will question what rights and responsibilities we bring with us to the Web.

“For example, the ethics of this week’s Wikileaks situation are complex and controversial, and no doubt everyone has an opinion. From the point of view of Web Science, the debate extends beyond the rights and wrongs of Wikileaks’ actions, to consider the ways that the use of the Web as a medium has changed the situation.â€?

To explore these issues, the workshop has invited keynote speeches, panel discussions and debate with an invited audience of practising engineers, academic researchers and philosophers.

The keynote speakers, in addition to Kieron O’Hara, are Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford) and Jeroen van den Hoven (Delft University of Technology).

The panellists include:

• Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust) • Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) • Yorick Wilks (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition/University of Oxford) • David Wright (Trilateral Research) Aleks Krotoski, Researcher-in-Residence, Growing Knowledge, British Library, who will present a session on: 'Introduction to Growing Knowledge: the Evolution of Research' said: "As we learn to navigate the World Wide Web for scholarship, we must take into consideration the people behind the machines. This demands new concepts of research ethics and practice, and a reflection on the relationship between online researcher and virtual participant."

Growing Knowledge – the Evolution of Research (12 October 2010 – 16 July 2011) showcases some never-seen-before research tools, thought-provoking content and futuristic design in a fully interactive research environment. The exhibition aims to challenge audiences on how research is changing and ask what they want to experience from the library of the future. The Library has worked closely with Researcher in Residence, Aleks Krotoski to ensure that visitors will not only experience an exhibition not seen before at the Library but also engage with the ongoing debate about the usefulness of these technologies in tomorrow’s Library.

Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Transparency and Open Data Adviser to UK Government, has been named as a leading Government IT Thought Leader 2010 by the influential web site Silicon.com

Silicon.com writes: "Professor Nigel Shadbolt has helped demonstrate how technology can open the doors on public information locked away in Whitehall.

"In June 2009 Shadbolt and world wide web creator Tim Berners-Lee were appointed information advisers, tasked with finding ways of harnessing tech to reuse the reams of data collected by public bodies.

"The pair's work led to the creation of data.gov.uk, a website designed to allow access to all non-personal data collected by government. The website already links to thousands of datasets, covering topics ranging from public transport routes to details about the highest earners in government.

"The public are already finding interesting new ways to use data.gov.uk's information – turning it into easy-to-digest graphics or web and smartphone apps that allow the data to be mashed up with other information to create useful new insights.

"The coalition government has retained Shadbolt's services, appointing him to the Public Sector Transparency Board, a body that is setting open data standards to make it easier for information to be shared across the public sector. He is also chairman of the Local Data Panel, which seeks to improve access to data held by local government.

"Shadbolt's spirit of openness has taken root in Whitehall - with the government setting up transparency.number10.gov.uk, a website designed to publish details of Whitehall department business plans, government spending and other information.

"Outside his public sector work, Shadbolt is professor of artificial intelligence and deputy head for research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

"Shadbolt is a director of the Web Science Trust, and of the World Wide Web Foundation – organisations that seek to advance our understanding of the web and promote the web's positive impact on society.

"He is a fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, and has previously served as BCS president."

Other leading figures named by Silicon.com include Martha Lane-Fox, Digital Champion, UK Government; Erik Huggers, Director of Future Media and Technology, BBC; and Tom Steinberg, Founder, mySociety.org web sites. ____

Professor Nigel Shadbolt is a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group in ECS. If you are interested in PhD research in this group you can find out more on our Postgraduate Admissions pages.

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

With the University closed due to the severe winter weather, ECS students showed their world-leading skills in snowperson-building.

The decision was taken on Thursday 2 December to close the University due to lack of support staff at work due to the severe weather, and to remain closed on Friday 3 December. It is anticipated that the University will open as normal on Monday but staff and students should await further updates which will be issued on the University web site.

The University and ECS have already said that the closure will be taken into account at what is an exceptionally busy time of year for coursework and project deadlines, and that students will not be disadvantaged.

The ECS snowperson, constructed in the Mountbatten/Zepler forecourt, followed the mysterious appearance in the undergraduate computing lab earlier this week of an exceptionally well-constructed piano-playing mechanical cat, demonstrating that even at the toughest times of the year ECS student ingenuity is in abundant supply.

See more photos of the snow on Colin Williams' (ECS PhD student) photostream on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crwilliams/

********Update*******

On Friday 3 December at 12 noon, the University issued the following statement:

University Re-opens

The University will return to normal operations on the morning of Monday 6 December.

We expect weather conditions to have improved by Saturday 4 December. For your own safety we would advise caution if you intend to travel to any of the campuses over the weekend as not all pathways will have been cleared or car parks gritted.

Over the weekend the University will be prioritising its efforts to support the student experience during the return to normal operations.

Student Halls These will be operating as normal.

Hartley Library On Highfield campus the Hartley Library will be open on Saturday at 9am as normal, although catering facilities will be limited.

Jubilee Sport Hall This facility will be closed until Monday.

Turner Sims Concert Hall The Courtney Pine performance scheduled for Friday 3 December has had to be postponed due to the severe weather. For further details please visit http://www.turnersims.co.uk/upcoming-events/2010/december/courtney-pine

Nuffield Theatre Performances are running as scheduled.

John Hansard Gallery The Gallery will be closed until Monday.

Please check the website for any updates

Heather Packer, a research student in the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group, won Best Student Research Paper Award at the prestigious ISWC 2010 conference, held last month in Shanghai.

Heather, who is supervised by Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Nick Gibbins, is working on the development of evolution algorithms for ontologies so that they can provide timely responses where a quick informed decision is required. The award at ISWC (International Semantic Web Conference) 2010 is the second 'best paper' she has been awarded this year, both of which relate to import aspects of her research. The first award (Best Paper), presented at IAT (Intelligent Agent Technology) 2010, held at Toronto, in September, was for a paper on a learning algorithm, which enables agents to incorporate a select set of new concepts into its ontology. The ISWC award was for a forgetting algorithm, which enables the agent to focus the domain of its ontology by removing concepts that impact the agents least.

The problem can be seen by considering an ambulance team trying to save a patient and which needs to decide what course of action to take. Consulting a large knowledge base - an ontology, can have slow response times due to various factors and does not enable the ambulance team to save the patient. Whereas, consulting a subset of the knowledge base may not yield the right results to save the patient.

The ambulance team needs to find a 'good enough' answer quickly enough so that the patient's condition doesn't deteriorate. This work is situated within RoboCup Rescue, a standard multi-agent platform that simulates the aftermath of an earthquake. Using this evolution approach agents are able to make decisions faster, save more civilians and extinguish more fires than other state-of-the-art approaches, because their ontology evolves to provide the information they need in a given timeframe. While this approach does not enable the agents to use complete knowledge, it is not necessary to know everything about concepts in a domain to make an informed decision. For example it is not important to know that your fire vehicle is "red with yellow lettering" if all you want to do is extinguish fires. According to Heather, this is a practical approach and has real impact on the success of the agents.

The papers which won the awards are available in ECS EPrints:

Packer, H. S., Gibbins, N. and Jennings, N. (2010) Collaborative learning of ontology fragments by cooperating agents. In: IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 1-3 September 2010, Toronto, Canada. Available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21241/

Packer, H. S., Gibbins, N. and Jennings, N. R. (2010) Forgetting Fragments from Evolving Ontologies. In: International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), 7-11th November 2010, Shanghai, China. Available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21555/

ECS was well represented at ISWC 2010, with one of the conference keynotes being given by dr mc schraefel, also of the IAM group, on: "What does it look like, really? Imagining how citizens might effectively, usefully and easily find, explore, query and re-present Open/Linked data".

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If you are interested in undertaking research in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group of the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, you can find out more information on the IAM group pages

For further information on this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel. 023 8059 5453.

ECS academic Dr Kieron O'Hara has been asked to lead a review of the impact of Transparency on Privacy to inform the UK Government's approach to the release of public data as part of the Transparency agenda.

The Transparency and Privacy Review was announced today (Tuesday 7 December) by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. The Review will enable Government to ensure that on-going releases of data provide maximum transparency of data consistent with the appropriate data protection safeguards.

Access to public data has been a key concern of the Government since it came to office, continuing an initiative which began in June 2009 when Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, appointed Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, both of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, as Advisers on linked open data and its release in the appropriate form. Earlier this year, Professors Shadbolt and Berners-Lee were appointed as Transparency and Open Data Advisers to the current Government, and have been working closely on the development of data.gov.uk and the provision of central and local government data that contribute to the transparency agenda.

The Review to be led by Dr O'Hara will support the Government in striking the right balance between transparency and data protection safeguards, and between the interests of wider society and the individual or corporate body; it will identify the nature of the risk to privacy of the individual, in particular the potential for 'jigsaw' identification; and advise the Government on practical approaches in the future.

Dr O'Hara has widespread interests in privacy, trust and in Web Science. Last week he chaired a conference at the British Library on 'Ethics and the Web', held at the British Library. His book 'Spy in the Coffee Machine: The end of privacy as we know it', co-authored with Nigel Shadbolt, covered many aspects of the most pressing and troubling aspects of threats to privacy in our society.

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

A new service developed by an ECS researcher enables Internet users to maintain multiple online accounts using a scan of their fingerprint as a password.

The new service, FingerID, has been developed by Sara Alotaibi, who has just completed a Masters degree in Web Technology at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science.

“FingerID provides users with the facility to maintain multiple Web accounts from a single source using a fingerprint scan, and eliminates their concerns about having to remember multiple usernames and passwords,â€? said Ms Alotaibi.

In order to develop FingerID, Ms Alotaibi evaluated existing and proposed systems geared towards replacing the conventional form of authentication using a username and password on the Web, and found that little work had been undertaken in this field. After evaluating these systems against criteria such as security, accessibility and usability, she generated a concept which could fundamentally alter the entire authentication mechanism: replacing memorised passwords with fingerprint data. This laid the foundation for FingerID - a service to maintain multiple Web accounts with the user's fingerprint.

The FingerID system is programmed to request the user’s fingerprint scan for registration purposes. Following registration, the user can then gain access to multiple Web accounts under one service. The registration process of the user will only take place once, and later scans will be used to verify the user to provide access to Web accounts. The FingerID system is composed of two main parts: Web site and software (browser).

“The username/password authentication mechanism is no longer fit for purpose, so FingerID has come at a good time,â€? said Ms Alotaibi. “We propose a cost-effective, convenient and secure authentication-solution for undertaking secure dealings over the Internet. It will allow Internet users to authenticate their identity in a hassle-free manner and go about their activities in a secure environment without the fear of loss of identity and money.â€?

Ms Alotaibi is now developing her approach further in her PhD (supervised by Dr David Argles and Dr Mike Wald in the ECS Learning Societies Lab) and will look at using other aspects of authentication such as palm prints and face gestures. She is also running an online survey to help her to develop her work further; this can be found at: http://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5haXGeNh0MHgEio.

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Sara Alotaibi is doing PhD research in the ECS Learning Societies Lab. If you are interested in research in this group you can find out more information on our Postgraduate Admissions pages.

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