Second-year Electronics students were presented with a testing and unusual ‘time-travel’ challenge in this year's Systems Design Exercise. Known to generations of students as ‘D4’, the project was sponsored for the second time by Detica, with components provided by TI.

Working in teams of four to six students for just 11 days, the students were asked to use state-of-the-art components to build a handheld video game system that could be taken back in time and marketed competitively in 1985. Judging criteria for the product’s success were defined as performance, features, price, aesthetics, and innovation.

The teams received precise specifications: for example, the device had to feature graphics and audio that would appeal to the 1985 market. The teams were also asked to make a video advert for their product and take part in a competitive pitch for their design in front of the judges and their classmates.

The judges were Dr Matt Sacker of the Detica Electronic Systems Group and an alumnus of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, along with Tim Forcer of ECS and Bob Bacon of TI.

"ECS actively encourages the involvement of industry-leading electronics companies in its undergraduate programmes, said Professor Steve Gunn, Course Leader. “This is great for the students - they hear about the latest developments in this fast-moving industry and have an opportunity to find out what employers are looking for in the next generation of electronic engineers.â€?

Pressure on the students was intense as they worked round the clock to design their handheld video game systems. Against a set of tough specifications, the students worked in groups, partitioning a large task amongst the individual team members. The students were expected to show initiative, creativity and innovation, to deploy good time management and trouble-shooting skills, and to undertake technical and market research, costing and budget analysis.

During the final judging session, Dr Sacker congratulated the students on the quality of what they had achieved: “The quality of the work produced by the students this year was much greater than when I was a student 10 years agoâ€?, he said. Describing the kinds of careers available in Detica and the quality of students for which the company is looking, Dr Sacker said that ECS students had a real advantage in the job market because of their experience of project work. “You have something very substantial that you can talk about at interviews as a result of your projects and real world experience, and that really makes Southampton students stand out,â€? he said.

The year 1985 was chosen for the time-travel element of the project because, according to ECS Electronics lecturer Dr Rob Maunder, it represented the golden age of bedroom video game development, when successful video games could be written by a few developers, in a few weeks. “As games became more sophisticated, video game development became the exclusive domain of large development teams, with large budgets and long timescales,â€? said Rob. “However, with the recent emergence of mobile phone gaming and indie game distribution channels, a second age of bedroom video game development is flourishing and we wanted to tap into this for D4.â€?

The winning team members were: Thomas Conheeney, Robert Gillott, Michael Smith, Matthew Brejza and Thomas Olak. Each received £100 from Detica for their prize. Course leaders were Professor Steve Gunn, Dr Geoff Merrett and Dr Rob Maunder, with support from Tim Forcer, Jeff Hooker and Dave Oakley.

You can find out more about project work at ECS in our Project Work video.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis.

Research on gait biometrics at the University of Southampton has passed another landmark with the first public demonstration of the technology’s ability to withstand deliberate spooking.

In a programme shown in the Discovery Channel’s 'Planet Earth' series, Professor Mark Nixon of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science explained how his research on gait – the way we walk – has progressed over the years. The programme was filmed in the ECS Biometrics Tunnel – the only one of its kind in the world. The technology based in the Tunnel combines and processes data from 12 cameras to produce an individual 'signature' of a person’s walk that is unique and recognizable with over 90 per cent accuracy.

In the first public test of the system, Professor Nixon and two of his PhD students, John Bustard and Darko Matovski, tried to fool the software by swapping clothes, wearing hats and scarves, and even a motorcycle helmet. The technology stood up to all these tests and Professor Nixon explained how this robustness has been able to help the UK police and security services. It may even be able to detect padding underneath clothing – for example, the changed body profile and walk of a suicide bomber.

“People are unique by quite a variety of different measures,â€? said Professor Nixon, “and that rich diversity is fascinating.â€?

Watch the Discovery Channel video.

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

The biggest test of IPv6 in action took place on Wednesday 8 June when ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton joined the world's major content providers including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, CNN and the BBC in the Internet Society's World IPv6 Day.

Companies and organizations around the world offered their content and services for 24 hours over the new IPv6 Internet Protocol. ECS has been contributing to the development of IPv6 for many years, and runs IPv6 throughout its own network, so was able to participate fully and help validate the new technology by encouraging its staff and students to use Facebook, YouTube, the BBC and other sites available via IPv6 on the day.

IPv6 is the successor to the existing IPv4 protocol that enables the vast majority of the Internet to work today. The current challenge is that the last unused IPv4 address space was allocated to Regional Registries in February this year, so it's becoming very important for everyone concerned with future Internet growth to gain experience with and to begin deploying IPv6. The new protocol can run alongside IPv4 - a process known as 'dual-stack' - for the foreseeable future, but eventually IPv6 will become the dominant Internet Protocol as its much larger address space will allow billions of new devices to connect to the Internet.

ECS has been researching and using IPv6 for several years, but to date there has been very little high profile content available via IPv6 outside of other academic research networks. On Wednesday, as ECS staff and students used their normal web browsers to access many of the world's top commercial web sites, those connections were running over IPv6 rather than tIPv4. The event proved that IPv6 is mature and ready for wider deployment, and also equally importantly that other people still using IPv4 were not adversely affected by Google, Facebook and others offering their content over both protocols.

"We shipped over 100GB of IPv6 traffic on 8 June, which was significantly more than we've ever done before, without any reports of connectivity problems for our users," said Dr Tim Chown, who has led ECS's IPv6 research and deployment work since the late 1990's. "It's been a fantastic day for the future of the Internet. The fact that the general public wouldn't have noticed anything different on Wednesday, while some of the world's most popular web sites ran IPv6 alongside IPv4 is a huge success. It's a great testament to all those people who have been working for many years to make IPv6 what it is today, and of course to the Internet Society for arranging this first coordinated IPv6 test flight. We've just begun analysing all the data we've collected from the day, and are already hopeful that a World IPv6 Week won't be too far away now."

ECS' home web site has been available dual-stack, via both IPv4 and IPv6, for many years. While Google, Facebook, the BBC and other World IPv6 Day participants will also be analysing the data they've gathered, some sites have been left available over IPv6 since Wednesday, including some of Google's YouTube video content, the Facebook developer's site at developers.facebook.com and Microsoft's gaming site at www.xbox.com. "While previous measurements by Google and other researchers have shown that as few as 0.05% of users have problems connecting to dual-stack sites, that's still a lot of people," said Dr Chown. "Wednesday's data will help Google and others to get that figure even lower, so that turning on IPv6 permanently for all their services becomes a real possibility. The challenge then is to encourage ISPs to deploy IPv6 to their customers. While IPv6 deployment is growing in academic networks, the larger commercial ISPs are lagging behind, especially in the UK."

Mat Ford, Technology Program Manager at the Internet Society commented "IPv6 deployment is fundamentally about the future scalability and utility of the Internet, and World IPv6 Day was a major milestone in the road towards that deployment. The day was always about exposing the diversity of the Internet's networks and users to IPv6 connectivity, so support from a long-established and thriving IPv6 network like that at ECS was extremely welcome. At the Internet Society, we've been thrilled with the support for the event, and it's very gratifying to see that many participants have seen this 'call-to-arms' as an opportunity to enable IPv6 and leave it enabled."

Friday 16 July will be a busy and high-profile day for Dr Mike Wald. Not only is he presenting at the ‘1st Digital Agenda Assembly’ for Europe, taking place in Brussels, but as a finalist in this year’s prestigious Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards, he will be attending the awards ceremony on the same day.

The Digital Assembly is organized by the European Commission’s Information Society and is part of the Digital Agenda for Europe initiative. The focus of the event is on shaping and co-creating a barrier-free digital Europe by people with disabilities themselves, in line with policy, technology, innovation and cooperation perspectives. Web accessibility for public and private online services plays a crucial part in this agenda. Dr Wald will be presenting his work on Synote, which has won wide recognition for its ability to transform learning for all students, including those with disabilities. Synote makes multimedia resources such as video and audio easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.

In a further initiative, Dr Wald will be talking about how Synote has incorporated crowdsourcing to provide a sustainable method of making audio or video recordings accessible to people who find it difficult to understand speech through hearing alone.

He comments: “Automatic captioning of lectures is possible using speech recognition technologies but it results in recognition errors requiring manual correction and this is costly and time-consuming. 'Crowdsourcing' the corrections of speech recognition transcription errors is a sustainable way of captioning lecture recordings.â€?

Dr Wald will be presenting remotely because he will be attending the Awards Ceremony in London with the University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Don Nutbeam, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education, Professor Debra Humphris. The University of Southampton has been shortlisted for the ‘ICT Initiative of the Year Award’ for its support and development of Synote.

"I am delighted that Synote has been appreciated and used throughout the world and has won and been nominated for so many awards since the first version was made available in 2008," said Dr Wald. ______

Dr Mike Wald is a member of the Learning Societies Lab in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in doing 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.

Dr Mike Short, Deputy President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and Vice-President of Telefonica Europe, was keynote speaker at this year’s Zepler Day event for final-year MEng students and MSc students in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.

The event marks the completion of the MEng students’ coursework, part of which is presented as a project poster. This year around 115 posters were displayed in the Mountbatten and Zepler Buildings. Zepler Day marks the contribution to electronics and wireless communications of the founder of ECS, Professor Eric Zepler, whose spirit of innovation and dedication to the advancement of new technologies remain fundamental commitments of ECS today. The students and academics were joined by guests including employers and local businesspeople.

In his address Dr Short discussed some of the issues that are facing the world today and the potential that exists for networked services to help provide new approaches to alleviating and solving them. Eric Cooke, Senior Tutor, who provided the final words of thanks to the students for their contribution to the School, said: ‘If you want to invent the future the best way is to work with people who are doing that already and ECS is a great place to see that happen.

‘I’m really looking forward to living in the world that you are going to invent for me!’

Graduation ceremonies for ECS students takes place this year on Monday 25 July.

Watch our video of Project Work in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.

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

Web scientists from around the world will be attending the third Web Science Conference which begins on Tuesday 14 June and takes place at Koblenz, Germany.

This is the first of the Conference series to be designated an ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Conference. It is also supported by the International Communication Association (ICA), and by the ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web (SIGWEB).

Keynote speakers are Professor Barry Wellman, Director of the NetLab at the University of Toronto, and Dr Jaime Teevan, a researcher in the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research.

The Conference has grown significantly since it first took place in Athens in 2009. This year there were almost 200 submissions from 30 countries. The programme incorporates a number of workshops and panels, covering Curriculum, Health, Location-Based Services, Governance & Trust, and Web Technologies.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton and a Founder-Director of the Web Science Trust, will be one of the opening speakers at the event on Wednesday 15 June, along with Professor David De Roure, who recently departed from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton to take up a chair at Oxford University. Professor De Roure is General Chair of ACM WebSci’11.

Conference sponsors are The World Wide Web Foundation, ROBUST, Microsoft Research, and NOW, along with DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and Universitat Koblenz-Landau.

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

Researchers from the University of Southampton will next week be demonstrating the success of an industrial collaboration which is creating cutting-edge nanotechnology needed for smaller, low power devices.

‘Knowledge Creation Partnership – From Funding to Results’ at the University of Southampton’s Mountbatten Building on Thursday 30 June, brings together University researchers in nanotechnology with industrialists from Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology (OIPT) to describe how the two organisations have worked together to develop a suite of nanotechnology tools.

The workshop, which is open to industry and academia, will demonstrate how both groups have benefited from their two-year collaboration.

“At the event, industry will learn about new processes and how to push the boundaries of technology and then develop it further,â€? said Dr Harold Chong of the University’s Nano Research Group within ECS-Electronics and Computer Science. “We have the knowledge and they have the machines.â€?

The University and OIPT worked together to develop a suite of processes for the OIPT tools which will be used to make nanoscale transistors. These new plasma-based technologies provide etching and deposition functions on nanoscale materials and are being used in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, one of Europe’s leading multidisciplinary state-of-the-art cleanroom complexes.

The cross-fertilisation of ideas between Southampton Nanofabrication Centre and Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology has led to a unique method for fabricating polysilicon nanowires for application in nanowire biosensors. The method is suitable for mass production, and biosensor blood-testing kits are being developed for the early detection of respiratory diseases.

Knowledge Creation Partnership – From Funding to Results will take place at the Mountbatten Building, University of Southampton, on Thursday 30 June from 9.30am to 4pm. To book a place, contact Claire Kiermasz on +44 1934 837000 or email: plasma@oxinst.com.

For further information contact <"a href=mailto:jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk">Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

Revolutionary low-power logic systems that will perform instant on/off logic operations are being developed by research scientists at the University of Southampton in partnership with the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan, and Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory.

The three-year UK-Japan project, which is co-led by Professor Hiroshi Mizuta of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, and Dr Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Atomic Electronics Group, NIMS, aims to build the world’s first non-volatile logic systems based on three-terminal atom transistors hybridized with nano-electro-mechanical (NEMS) switches.

The new device will initially become available as an integrated logic-memory chip so that it can be used in portable devices. As a result of this memory retention capacity, devices such as computers and mobile phones will become smaller and lighter.

According to Dr Harold Chong of Southampton’s Nano Research Group, the new device is being developed to address the fact that modern computer chips are using an increasing amount of power. "In fact, research has shown that the power density of chips can be the same as the surface of the sun," he said.

To reduce power usage, the researchers are aiming to increase the non-volatile part of the memory which is contained on the computer chip. The logic behind this is that if the non-volatile memory is expanded, then it will not be necessary to apply large amounts of power to the chip in order for it to retain information in its memory.

“There will be huge benefits from the cooperation between the Southampton and NIMS teams,â€? said Professor Mizuta. “We will be cooperating closely in overcoming current technological bottlenecks and accelerating the development of novel non-volatile logic devices, which have not yet been achieved with other approaches.â€?

The project aims to realise the world’s first low-power and non-volatile logic system based on three-terminal metal oxide atom transistors hybridised with nano-electro-mechanical devices. A key feature of this system will be an “on/offâ€? switch operated by a suspended nanobeam which moves up and down when activated by voltage and results in an instant powering of the computer with no time lag.

“The ‘instant’ nature of this switch means that it only needs a few pico watts per transistor resulting in very low power requirements,â€? said Dr Chong. “There is potentially very low leakage in this device resulting in portable computing equipments that will be lighter and more powerful. This technology will also relieve the bottleneck in information processing, which at the moment is clogged up on its own memory.â€?

The research is funded by the Engineering and Physical Research Council’s strategic UK-Japan cooperative program with Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

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For further information about research opportunities in the ECS Nano group, see our Postgraduate web pages.

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

ECS academics Dr Steve Beeby and Dr Seth Bullock have been awarded Personal Chairs.

Steve joined the University of Southampton Institute of Transducer Technology (USITT) in 1993 where he completed his PhD on the subject of optimising the design of micromechanical silicon resonators and stress isolating packaging. He then joined ECS as a member of the Electronic Systems and Devices Group and has been researching in the field of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) and Microsystems (MST) devices for over 10 years.

Steve was awarded a prestigious EPSRC Leadership Fellowship last year to undertake research on generating energy through people’s movement, eliminating the need to change batteries on devices. His team will use rapid printing processes and active printed inks to create an energy-harvesting film in textiles. This film can also be printed on carpets, enabling individuals to generate energy as they walk around the home or office.

The research, which begins in October and runs until 2015, will provide a toolbox of materials and processes suitable for a range of different fabrics that will enable users to develop the energy harvesting fabric best suited to their requirements.

Steve commented: "I am very proud to have been awarded a personal Chair, which is a significant milestone in my career. The support of my colleagues, the excellent facilities and the dynamic work ethic within ECS have been incredibly important and I look forward to building up my research further in the future."

Seth joined the University of Southampton in 2005 as Senior Lecturer, and helped to found the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) research group. In 2009 he became head of the SENSe group, and also became Director of Southampton's new Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS).

"My research is very collaborative", he says, "I'm interested in developing models of complex systems and using them to engage with the questions and concerns of scientists and practitioners involved with those systems. That means that almost everything that I've done has owed a lot to the people that I've worked with, and in particular to my amazing students and post-docs.

"The wider complexity science activity at Southampton has grown enormously in size and in status since I joined the University in 2005, and now involves academics across the entire campus and many millions of pounds worth of investment in research. With the arrival of our two newest faculty appointments, James Dyke and Markus Brede, the SENSe group within ECS is certainly one of the most significant complexity science groups in the country, recognised as nationally leading by the UK's research councils, and, with the help of colleagues across the University, running an extremely ambitious doctoral training programme in complex systems simulation.

"We are currently experiencing a rapid increase in the significance of "systems" questions such as those concerning global finance, global sustainability, global climate change, global technology, global food security, global governance, and global security. Answering these questions will involve understanding complex systems made up of many parts that interact in sometimes subtle ways. The challenge for my colleagues and myself is to make sure that our complexity science research engages with these questions in ways that make a positive difference."

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

Open Days for prospective students take place this year on Friday and Saturday, 8 & 9 July, and on Friday and Saturday 2 & 3 September.

On each of those days ECS-Electronics and Computer Science will be holding a day of tours, presentations, demonstrations and drop-in sessions, highlighting the opportunities available on our degree programmes, and emphasizing the unique character of the School. Visitors will have the chance to see all our undergraduate labs, and to meet past and current students, as well as to find out about our students' excellent career prospects.

Presentations are held in the Turner Sims Building (see map) and begin at 10 am (the Turner Sims is open for registration from 9 am with coffee available); there will then be separate tours and presentations for Computer Science & Software Engineering; Electrical & Electromechanical Engineering; Electronic Engineering; and Information Technology in Organisations. These presentations and tours are repeated at 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm.

Between 12 noon and 2 pm we will be holding two drop-in sessions in the Mountbatten Building (at 12 noon and 1 pm) where visitors can meet staff and students, tour the labs, watch videos of our Careers Fair and student project work, and find out more from ECS Admissions Tutors. Refreshments will be available. There will also be a presentation on 'Robotics in ECS' by Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner (12 noon in Turner Sims), and a Careers Talk by Joyce Lewis, who runs the ECS employability initiative, at 12.30 in Mountbatten Building.

The University of Southampton Open Day web site provides further information and booking.

'Visiting universities is extremely important in enabling students to find the best place for their study,' says ECS Professor Alun Vaughan. 'There are many factors which make a difference to the kind of educational experience that will suit a particular student and we urge prospective students to take advantage of these visit days to find out as much as they can about what we can offer them.'

Watch our Introduction to ECS Open Days (video) by Professor Alun Vaughan.

Electronics and Electrical Engineering is ranked 1st and 3nd in the UK in recent league tables (The Guardian and The Times May/June 2010) and Computer Science and IT is ranked 5th and 8th.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON OPEN DAY DATA MAP

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