If the reindeer are also having to self-isolate, then the drones will be most useful this year. Santa may need about a million drones to do this, with some bigger ones transporting the gifts from the North Pole, others bringing them to homes, and even smaller ones taking them down the chimney to living rooms.
Will Santa use AI to deliver his presents this Christmas?
Just as for all of us, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have really taken their toll at the North Pole this year. One major hurdle remains: how will Santa deliver his presents this winter?
Published: 15 December 2020
Southampton is a Centre of Excellence in both cyber security research and education.
First-rate cyber security teaching at the University of Southampton has been recognised with a prestigious Gold Award in a new government programme from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Southampton is one of the first universities in the UK to be named an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE).
The Gold Award complements the University's existing status as a Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research, which it first obtained in 2012.
Professor Sassone, Director of Southampton's Cyber Security Research Centre and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair, says: "Southampton has delivered significant impact in cyber security research and education at regional, national and international levels for many years and this latest recognition by the NCSC only confirms our position as a world-leader in this very important field of study and activity.
"Very few universities in the UK - and around the world - can boast excellence in both cyber security research and education but my colleagues at Southampton, together with our many partners in academia and industry, have proven that we certainly do stand out in addressing the many cyber security threats we experience daily."
Professor Hywel Morgan is partnering with Nuclera to create a robust gene printer.
Bioelectronics expertise from the University of Southampton is supporting the development of a benchtop gene printer in a growing partnership with the UK-based Nuclera biotech company.
The new two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) will embed an Associate in the programme to focus on building up key functionalities, such as the novel sensing functions on the platform.
Having rapid access to highly accurate DNA, and its gene and protein sequences, will enable accelerated scientific discoveries and product development across a range of sectors, including medicine, agrobiotechnology and organism engineering.
Dr Jiahao Huang, co-founder of Nuclera, says: "The desktop instrument we are developing is a major step forward for the local synthesis of genes. Being able to produce genes at the benchtop, with all of the control and time saving it offers, has huge market potential.
"The additional expertise and even closer working relationship afforded by this KTP grant will significantly strengthen a key area of our product development."
Professor Morgan’s expertise in bio-sensors and lab-on-a-chip technologies is supporting investigation of the specific engineering steps required to create the robust gene printer. A critical element is the incorporation of a borderless fluid movement platform to provide optimum process automation.
Professor Morgan says: "It is a great opportunity to work with Nuclera to realise their dream of developing a benchtop instrument that can produce genes on demand. I am very excited by the award of the KTP, and look forward to working with Nuclera and the KTN to deliver this exciting project."
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships aim to help businesses improve their competitiveness and productivity through better use of the knowledge, technology and skills held within the UK knowledge base. This KTP project received financial support from UKRI through Innovate UK.
Jody Chatterjee, Knowledge Transfer Adviser, Knowledge Transfer Network, says: "This is an exciting project with an ambitious and innovative company. Nuclera is looking to transform the industry with its novel technology and the KTP is the perfect programme to help this happen. I am looking forward to working with the team as they deliver their game-changing desktop gene printer."
Dr BooJoong Kang is a Lecturer (Assistant Prof. equivalent) in Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Dr Kang obtained a Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Engineering in 2013 from Hanyang University in Korea, with a thesis about machine learning based Windows malware detection. He was a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, UK, from 2014 to 2021 before he joined the University of Southampton. His research is currently focused on cyber security and AI, including intrusion detection, malware analysis, Cloud & IoT security and CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) security. He is author of more than 40 papers (h-index 15, 944 citations, source Google Scholar), published on international conferences, journals, and books.
Dr Kang investigated the intrusion detection and response system to improve CPS security aginst realistic cyber attack scenarios. This research was carried out as part of the EU FP7 project Smart grid Protection Against cybeR attacKS (SPARKS, 2014-2017, €4.8M). He was also involved in two projects as part of RITICS, the UK’s national Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-physical Systems, Converged APproach towards Resilient Industrial control systems and Cyber Assurance (CAPRICA, 2015-2017, £394K) and Cloud-enabled Operation, Security Monitoring, and forensICs (COSMIC, 2018-2021, £249K).
The Alpha cluster has been installed in the University of Southampton’s high-performance computing facility.
The University of Southampton will remain at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advances through the upgraded processing power of a new high-performance compute cluster in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).
The Alpha cluster, based in the University's state-of-the-art data centre near Southampton, features 24 NVidia RTX8000 GPUs installed across six cluster nodes.
The new facility complements the existing GPU computing provision of the fifth generation IRIDIS Compute Cluster and ECS teaching laboratories, and is specifically aimed at workloads requiring large amounts of GPU memory or long run times.
The cluster enables researchers to train highly parallel machine learning and AI neural networks, while also providing an invaluable resource for Southampton’s research-led teaching programmes.
Each Alpha GPU contains approximately 5,000 processing cores, combining to 120,000 cores across the whole cluster.
Each GPU card has 48GB of RAM to tackle large training data sets that can be stored on the 20TB of fast storage attached to each node. In addition, each node features 100GB/s NVLink interfaces giving outstanding performance when using multiple GPUs.
Lance Draper, Research Systems Manager in Engineering and Physical Sciences, says: "This equipment has been purchased for the exclusive use of ECS staff and students and allows the School to meet ever increasing teaching and research demands for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems."
The Alpha cluster, whose name is inspired by DeepMind's AlphaZero AI system, is already being used by researchers to simulate the complex processes of the optic nerve.
In recent work with PhD students Daniela Mihai, Ethan Harris and Associate Professor Dr Jonathon Hare, computer scientists used Alpha to train variants of the ResNet50 image classification model on the ImageNet dataset to understand how retinal bottlenecks affect these models.
The latest research will be presented at the Shared Visual Representations in Human & Machine Intelligence workshop at the 2020 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on Saturday 12th December.
Dr Hare, of the Vision, Learning and Control Research Group, says: "The new ECS Alpha cluster allows us to investigate how changes to neural network architectures, hyperparameters and training regimes affects what those networks learn in ways that were not possible for us to do before.
"The large-memory GPUs in the cluster allow us to be much more efficient in our training procedures as a result of increased data throughout, and remove limits on model size. Scientifically this is very important because it allows us to understand errors and draw more concrete conclusions from the models we create."
Professor Mike Wald from the University of Southampton has highlighted the urgent need for artificial intelligence to be designed and deployed in a manner that doesn't increase societal inequalities.
Speaking at a Couch Lesson of the international Goethe-Institut, the Turing Fellow insisted that proactive consideration is required for algorithmic systems to be designed in a manner that is fair, transparent and ethical.
He warned that these considerations for AI and inclusion were particularly vital when considering those with disabilities, otherwise an emerging 'AI divide' could compromise the equal treatment of people.
Professor Wald, of the Web and Internet Science Research Group, says: "Of the nine protected characteristics identified by the Equality Act 2010, disability is the least homogeneous and so techniques need to be developed to ensure algorithms work fairly for these edge 'cases' and 'outliers' by including disabled people at all stages.
"The design and deployment of AI to benefit disabled people will also help provide digital accessibility and inclusion for all members of society."
The Goethe-Institut event, which was held online this Wednesday, invited Professor Wald and Nnenna Nwakanma of the World Wide Web Foundation to discuss the opportunities and challenges of enabling equal access to AI technologies. The session was part of the Generation A=Algorithm project supported by the European AI Alliance.
Professor Wald's project with The Alan Turing Institute has explored the way AI has been used to automate web accessibility checkers to support those with disabilities. The project team has also worked closely with local assistive technology and service providers to conduct research into a decision support system related to workplace assessments for disabled people.
Recent work at Southampton has also led to the development of Synote, an award-winning tool for creating online and paper captions, transcripts and notes from lecture recordings.
Earlier this month, Professor Wald presented on AI and inclusion at an online Space and Astronomy Research Accessibility SARA2020 event hosted by the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC). The workshop brought together expert speakers from around the world to help generate tools, programmes and schemes that can improve the access to data and training for researchers and young professionals with disabilities.
The Southampton fellowship will develop AI that could help people switch to greener forms of energy and transport.
AI systems will be re-designed to value people as more than passive providers of data in a prestigious new Turing Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Fellowship at the University of Southampton.
The novel research, led by Electronics and Computer Science's Dr Sebastian Stein, will create AI systems that are aware of citizens' preferences and act to maximise the benefit to society.
In these systems, citizens are supported by trusted personal software agents that learn an individual’s preferences. Importantly, rather than share this data with a centralised system, the AI agents keep it safe on private smart devices and only use it in their owners' interests.
Over the next five years, the ã1.4m fellowship will develop and trial citizen-centric AI systems in a range of application areas, such as smart home energy management, on-demand mobility and disaster response, including for the provision of advice and medical support during epidemics like COVID-19.
Dr Stein, of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) research group, says: "AI systems are increasingly used to support and often automate decision-making on an unprecedented scale. Such AI systems can draw on a vast range of data sources to make fast, efficient, data-driven decisions to address important societal challenges and potentially benefit millions of people.
"However, building AI systems on such a large and pervasive scale raises a range of important challenges. First, these systems may need access to relevant information from people, such as health-related data, which raises privacy issues and may also encourage people to misrepresent their requirements for personal benefit. Furthermore, the systems must be trusted to act in a manner that aligns with society’s ethical values. This includes the minimisation of discrimination and the need to make equitable decisions.
"Novel approaches are needed to build AI systems that are trusted by citizens, that are inclusive and that achieve their goals effectively. To enable this, citizens must be viewed as first-class agents at the centre of AI systems, rather than as passive data sources."
The new vision for AI systems will be achieved by developing techniques that learn the preferences, needs and constraints of individuals to provide personalised services, incentivise socially-beneficial behaviour changes, make choices that are fair, inclusive and equitable, and provide explanations for these decisions.
The Southampton team will draw upon a unique combination of research in multi-agent systems, mechanism design, human-agent interaction and responsible AI.
Dr Stein will work with a range of high-profile stakeholders over the duration of the fellowship. This will include citizen end-users, to ensure the research aligns with their needs and values, as well as industrial partners, to put the research into practice.
Specifically, collaboration with EA Technology and Energy Systems Catapult will generate incentive-aware smart charging mechanisms for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, work with partners including Siemens Mobility, Thales and Connected Places Catapult will develop new approaches for trusted on-demand mobility. Within the Southampton region, the fellowship will engage with the Fawley Waterside development to work on citizen-centric solutions to smart energy and transportation.
The team will also work with Dstl to create disaster response applications that use crowdsourced intelligence from citizens to provide situational awareness, track the spread of infectious diseases or issue guidance to citizens. Further studies with Dstl and Thales will explore applications in national security and policing, and joint work with UTU Technologies will investigate how citizens can share their preferences and recommendations with trusted peers while retaining control over what data is shared and with whom.
Finally, with IBM Research, Dr Stein will develop new explainability and fairness tools, and integrate these with their existing open source frameworks.
Turing Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Fellowships, named after AI pioneer Alan Turing, are supported by a ã20 million government investment in AI being delivered by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in partnership with the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, Office for AI and the Alan Turing Institute.
Science Minister, Amanda Solloway, says: "The UK is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and we therefore have a duty to equip the next generation of Alan Turings, like Southampton's Dr Sebastian Stein, with the tools that will keep the UK at the forefront of this remarkable technological innovation.
"The inspiring AI project we are backing today to will help inform UK citizens in their decision making - from managing their energy needs to advising which mode of transport to take - transforming the way we live and work, while cementing the UK's status as a world leader in AI and data."
Digital Minister, Caroline Dinenage, says: "The UK is a nation of innovators and this government investment will help our talented academics use cutting-edge technology to improve people's daily lives - from delivering better disease diagnosis to managing our energy needs."
