Adam Malpass, final-year student in Electronic Engineering at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was last night awarded the first annual Scholar of the Year award by the United Kingdom Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF).

The award was sponsored by IC Group and announced at the NMI’s annual awards ceremony held in London. Speaking at the event Neil Dickens, a director at IC Group, said: “It’s vital for the UK industry’s future growth that we attract, support and retain as many talented young individuals, such as Adam, as possible.

“In a very competitive year Adam stood out from the crowd, especially for his infectious enthusiasm, outstanding contributions to Dialog and his encouragement of younger students to take up electronics.â€?

During his three-month summer placement with Dialog Semiconductor, the sponsor of his UKESF Scholarship, Adam produced a new design for use in its range of flagship products and delivered a research report to help facilitate a move into a new line of business.

To help inspire younger students to take up electronics Adam has been involved in many activities with his former school, and through his university. These include talking to students of all ages about the exciting, varied opportunities in electronics, in addition to his blog on the ECS pages, which relates his experiences as an electronics undergraduate.

On winning his award Adam commented: "I'm really delighted to have won this award as I know the competition was strong, especially from my fellow Southampton University and UKESF scholar Tom Dell. The UKESF scholarship has provided me with development opportunities that a student wouldn't normally have, such as working internationally with a world-class company, meeting industry leaders and receiving training in the softer, professional skills that aren't taught at university"

Dr Derek Boyd, NMI’s CEO, said: “As a founding partner of UKESF we have been delighted by the quality of the undergraduate students within the scholarship scheme. Adam is just one of an exceptional group of younger people and I expect to see him contribute greatly to our sector in the future.â€?

Rebecca Whatley-Stokes, Global Head of Learning and Development at Dialog Semiconductor, commented: “Adam has been fantastic during his time at Dialog, he’s a real credit to young engineers and will do very well in future. The UKESF has given us a great opportunity to spot the most talented individuals, such as Adam, earlier than our competition.â€?

Professor Neil White, Head of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, commented: 'Many congratulations to Adam on this very prestigious award, and also to Tom, the other finalist in the competition. We are immensely proud of our students' abilities and their enthusiasm as they look forward to contributing to the electronics industry. The fact that Southampton provided the two finalists in this inaugural Award underlines the environment in ECS, which is very much geared to producing the kinds of students that industry wants and needs in the future."

UKESF was founded in 2010 by collaboration of public bodies, private companies and UK universities to address the threat of a diminishing skills base in the UK electronics sector. Its principal aims are to increase and sustain the supply of industry ready graduate engineers and boost career take up in the industry, worth £23 billion per year to the UK economy.

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

Researchers from the ORCHID project will present their work on the use of computerised agents for home energy management and disaster responses this week at TechWorld, the UK's leading technology event.

A team led by Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Alex Rogers of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton has been invited to present a poster at TechWorld (16-17 November) which focuses this year on Energy & Environment + Digital Connected World.

The poster - 'Human-Agent Collectives: From Foundations to Applications', focuses on the ORCHID researchers' work on the new science of human-agent collectives, which is exploring how computerised agents can interact with humans. The poster is a contender for the TechWorld University Excellence competition prize, which will be announced on Thursday (17 November).

"Working with computerised agents presents a number of challenges," said Professor Jennings, ORCHID Director. "One aspect is looking at the balance between humans that decide everything and software that decides everything. Another is looking at how agents fulfil tasks and disband when they are complete, and we are also looking at how agents can be encouraged to act in ways that generate socially desirable outcomes."

ORCHID is approaching these challenges by blending expertise in statistical information processing and multi-agent systems with human-agent interaction.

The five-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with significant funding from its industrial partners, has applications in future energy systems, disaster management, and defence and security industries.

The project brings together over 60 researchers from a range of disciplines at the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR).

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

Twenty-four senior directors from the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology visited ECS-Electronics and Computer Science last week to hear about the UK’s deployment of IPv6 from Dr Tim Chown, a leading expert in IPv6, the next generation of Internet address protocols.

Dr Chown has been an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which has been working on IPv6 since the mid-1990s. In preparation for the advent of IPv6, the work carried out by Dr Chown and his colleagues in ECS has ensured that IPv6 has been standardized and that operational experience has been fed into the development process. Today IPv6 support is available in almost all modern router and operating system platforms, including Windows 7, MacOS X and Linux.

The data network in ECS runs both IPv4 and IPv6 alongside each other, a method known as dual-stack, and many of the ECS public-facing services including web, mail and DNS are available via IPv6 as well as IPv4. The deployment in ECS has helped validate the IETF protocols and their implementations by showing that IPv6 can be run successfully alongside IPv4 in production networks.

In addition to hearing about this progress from Dr Chown, the Chinese delegation were also able to hear about advances in new technology for wireless communications from Professor Lie-Liang and Professor Lajos Hanzo of ECS. Professor Hanzo is involved in the UK-China Science Bridges R&D on Wireless Mobile Communications which has the ultimate goal of creating a UK-China Joint R&D Centre for Future Wireless Communication Networks, and is funded by the UK Research Councils to facilitate the collaboration of British and Chinese academic institutions. Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, UK Open Government Data Adviser, also spoke on the advances made in the provision of public data in the UK and throughout the world, enabling citizens to benefit from access to government and business data.

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For further information about this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 3212.

Only a few weeks after arriving in the University of Southampton from Mexico City to begin his undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Alejandro Saucedo was meeting David Cameron in 10 Downing Street at a reception that celebrated his skills in app-building.

Alejandro was one of three students from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science invited to Downing Street last week as part of their prize in the national competition run by the organization Silicon Valley Comes to the UK. The aim of the competition, which involved hundreds of students around the UK taking part in two-day ‘appathon’ events, was to design useful consumer apps using new open data from the Government on healthcare, education, and the environment.

Alejandro, along with his team members, Unmesh Gangadharan, an MSc student in ECS doing Web Technology, and Anthony Brown, in the first year of a degree in Electronic Engineering, won their award for 'The Emergency Button', an app which could save lives and reduce potential crises by enabling users to notify relatives in an emergency, or to provide essential information. The team had to make a video of their pitch as part of their entry to the competition.

“It was truly an honour for us to meet the Prime Minister,â€? said Alejandro, “and to have the opportunity to be inside 10 Downing Street. “My mother actually came from Mexico just for this award ceremony. We are really grateful for all the support we received from the University of Southampton and ECS during the competition.â€?

As part of their prize the ECS team had a mentoring session with Nicholas Heller, Director of EMEA Google, who offered advice on further development of the app.

“Our plan is to complete the main functionality of The Emergency Button, and upload it in the Android market as soon as we can,â€? said Alejandro. “However, to continue with our project any further, we would need support from an institution. My plan is to propose our project to organizations such as the NHS, insurance companies and even to the Government - during our visit to Downing Street, I had the honour to discuss our idea with the UK Health Secretary!â€?

As a further part of his prize, Alejandro will represent his team when 10 of the prizewinning app designers are taken on a visit to Silicon Valley in California next Spring.

The students were accompanied to London by Christopher Gutteridge, Web Projects Manager in ECS. who organized the University of Southampton Appathon, held in October and sponsored by ECS-Electronics and Computer Science and local company Snowflake Software.

Watch coverage of the reception on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15770190.

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

An open-source Web application which transforms learning for all students, devised and developed in ECS by Dr Mike Wald, has won the title of 'ICT Initiative of the Year' in the annual awards ceremony for UK universities run by Times Higher Education.

The award to Synote was presented in London last night (24 November) and ends a year in which Synote has been recognized around the world for its innovation and the new opportunities it brings to students and learning, particularly disabled students.

Synote has been developed over a numbers of years in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. It 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.

"Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers,’ says Dr Wald. ‘Synote actually provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording."

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. The programme has a whole range of useful features. It enables learners or teachers to read and search text transcripts and slides and replay recordings to support learning style preference, deafness, disability or English as a second language; to bookmark, tag and highlight and link to or from sections of recordings for indexing, revision, clarification or feedback; and to collaboratively annotate recordings with notes and URLs of related resources.

Synote can play most audio and video formats on most browsers and computers. Evaluations have shown that students like using Synote, find the synchronised transcripts and note-taking facility useful and want more recordings and lectures to be available in this way.

Synote has been developed with the support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

In a further initiative, 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.

Dr Wald 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€?

"This is wonderful recognition for an initiative which really gets to the heart of how ICT can be used and developed to make a real difference to people's lives," said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University. "The team led by Mike Wald has been working on Synote for a number of years, in parallel with other technologies, which are open source - so available to everyone, and which improve the quality of the educational experience in many different ways. Synote has been particularly successful and welcomed by different communities around the world, leading to a series of awards of which this is the latest."

"It is great to get such important recognition for the fantastic work of Southampton's staff and students who have contributed to Synote's development," added Dr Wald.

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

A lecture to be given on campus this week tells the fascinating story behind the most intriguing Jeopardy! challenge so far ....

Earlier this year an IBM computer took part in the well-known US tv quiz show and beat the best contestants of all time.

The next event in the Distinguished Lecture series at the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences goes inside the mind of Watson, the IBM computer.

Watson is a computer system (devised and built by IBM engineers) which is capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level rivalling the best humans at the task. In this lecture Dr Chris Welty, Research Scientist at IBM's T J Watson Research Center in New York, will discuss how Watson works at a high level with examples from the show.

Chris Welty taught Computer Science at Vassar College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before moving to industrial research. His principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the Semantic Web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team.

The Lecture takes place on Thursday 1 December at 5 pm in the Turner Sims Concert Hall on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.

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

ECS Professors Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been named as co-directors of a new world-leading Open Data Institute, established by the UK Government to innovate, exploit and research Open Data opportunities.

The new Institute will be based in Shoreditch, the newly designated 'Tech City UK' area of London, where there is a huge concentration of Web 2.0 start-ups, and it will involve business and academic institutions.

The Open Data Institute is intended to help demonstrate the commercial value of public data and the impact of open data policies on the realisation of this value. The Institute will also help develop the capability of UK businesses to exploit open data opportunities, with support from University researchers. It will help the public sector use its own data more effectively and it will engage with developers and the private and public sectors to build supply chains and commercial outlets for public data. The Government is to commit up to £10m over five years to support the Open Data Institute through the Technology Strategy Board - in a match-funded collaboration with industry and academic centres.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI, said: “One of the reasons the Web worked was because people reused each other’s content in ways never imagined by those who created it. The same will be true of Open Data. The Institute will allow us to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using Open Government Data.â€?

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI said:

“Data is the new raw material of the 21st century and the UK is world-leading in the release of Open Government Data. Open Government Data not only increases transparency and accountability but also creates economic and social value. The Institute will help business to realise this value and foster a generation of open data entrepreneurs.â€?

The new Institute is one of a number of measures that the Government announced today as part of a larger initiative to boost UK economic growth.

A working robot controlled by a slime mould, and designed and built in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will play a starring role in a major BBC4/Discovery Channel series to be aired from tomorrow (Tuesday 6 December).

Afterlife - The Strange Science of Decay, uses time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.

Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by. But as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

One aspect of the series shows the sometimes surprising ability of moulds to react to external stimuli. Earlier this year the production team spent a whole day in ECS, filming with Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner and Dr Soichiro Tsuda, who developed the slime-mould robot. Its central innovation is that its movements are controlled by a biochip which encapsulates a plasmodial cell of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. An electronic interface enables the slime-mould cell to be connected to a computer in order to monitor local mechanical oscillations in the cell and it also provides stimulation for the slime-mould through light signals, causing the movement of the robot.

Dr Tsuda told the programme presenter, Dr George McGavin, that his inspiration for the robot had come from Dr Who’s Daleks! ‘It’s amazing that something that lives on dead trees can be used to control a machine,’ said Dr McGavin.

Physarum polycephalum has been used by Dr Zauner in research projects which have included both research students and undergraduates in ECS over a number of years: Gareth Jones, now a PhD student in ECS, developed the drive system of the robot in his Part III project and ECS Electronics graduate Paul Macey developed the interface to the slime-mould cell in his Part III project.

Klaus-Peter commented “There was a time when people in hot-air balloons looked at pigeons and realised that there is a radically different solution to the problem of flight. Now we marvel at nature's molecular computers which tell us that there are radically different solutions to the problem of information processing.

‘To harvest the potential of molecular computing, however, we need a generation of engineers with a broad concept of computation - I am therefore particularly pleased that the most important component of this robot was developed by an undergraduate, Paul Macey.â€?

Physarum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood.

‘Afterlife’ will be shown on 6, 7, and 9 December. It will examine many different aspects of decomposition and decay, including the complexity of organisms that are associated with decomposition, as well as exploring our attitudes to bacteria and the breakdown of bio-systems.

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

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An energy quiz which tests people's knowledge of the amount of energy used by devices and processes, such as lights on the Christmas tree, has been developed by researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton.

A team led by Dr Alex Rogers of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group developed The Energy Quiz for BT. The "game with a purpose" is intended to challenge BT employees to test their knowledge about energy.

The online quiz invites players to compete by answering 12 questions about energy comparisons. For example, it asks: which uses more energy - a Christmas tree with 100 lights continuously lit over the festive period or a dishwasher used once a week for month; or it compares heating water for a typical office for a year with a full Boeing 747 flying 400 miles; or heating a typical office for a day versus driving a car 100 miles.

BT has invited 200 employees to play the game and will roll it out to a further 3,500 in the next phase. “For us this is a way of conserving energy and we are finding that there is a deficiency of knowledge about energy among our employees,â€? said Simon Thompson, BT Chief Researcher. “We have also found that this kind of knowledge is often dull for people and they are not too interested in the statistics, so if we can encourage them to play a game around energy, it makes it more fun.â€?

According to Dr Rogers, The Energy Quiz can be tailored to specific work or home environments. With the release of an updated version worldwide this week, he plans to analyse the data to explore people’s misconceptions about energy.

“Our informal results so far show that people have a lot less intuition about energy than you would think,â€? he said. “People think that home consumption is always higher than driving their car to work and they often assume that appliances in the foreground that make a lot of noise or generate heat use more energy over the course of a year than something hidden away in the background.â€?

The Energy Quiz is one of a whole host of tools to monitor energy being developed at ECS. Dr Rogers and his team have also developed a range of tools to visualise the real-time carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid and they have developed tools for building energy monitoring. They are also developing computerised agents that can negotiate the charging of electric-powered cars in the most efficient way.

Researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton have launched new software which allows organisations to develop evacuation plans using a combination of crowdsourcing and computer simulations.

Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn and a team of researchers in the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group have devised CollabMap and are now inviting organizations to volunteer information about connections to buildings and roads in their area, so that an evacuation plan can be created for them.

"CollabMap will be of interest to any organization that wants to develop an evacuation plan," said Dr Ramchurn. "We don't just use the information to build a map; we build a computer simulation that shows how people move around an area. Once people log in and draw routes, we aggregate the data to produce a high fidelity map over which we can simulate the movement of thousands of individuals across roads and open spaces, using parallel programming techniques."

CollabMap follows on from crowdsourcing and computer simulation work undertaken by Dr Ramchurn for Hampshire County Council with funding from EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the ORCHID project. ORCHID focuses on capitalising on human/computer interactions in disaster response scenarios.

One of the areas that will be mapped using CollabMap is the Fawley Oil Depot, near Southampton, which is the second biggest oil depot in the world and an area of high risk. Members of the public can take part in the CollabMap exercise, whether they know the area or not. Dr Ramchurn explains how it works on the CollabMap video on YouTube.

The Fawley mapping exercise will run for two months. Similar exercises can be run in any part of the world and can be used by organisations interested in their data being used for evacuation simulations.

The researchers involved in CollabMap are: Dr Ruben Stranders, Dr Trung Dong Huynh, and Dr Bing Shi.

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