Daniel J. Weitzner, Director of the Decentralized Information Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, will be delivering a Distinguished Faculty Lecture on Monday 11 February.

Daniel Weitzner will lecture on the subject: ‘Is the Internet Governable?’, asking if the new central nervous system of the world’s political, economic and social life is actually ungovernable.

The Internet’s third decade has begun with raging policy debates about privacy (EU Data Protection Regulation and the US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights), copyright (the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the International Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), cybersecurity, as well as proposals to bring the Internet to heel under the control of the United Nations. Each of these debates pits efforts to impose centralized control over the flow of online information against demands for unfettered freedom for Internet users. In order to be sure that the Internet can continue to be a platform for innovation and grow to reach the 70% of the planet’s population still not online, policymakers have to tread carefully.

Beginning with a policymaker’s view of how Internet debates have played out over the last four years, Weitzner will present some fundamental principles that should guide the development of Internet public policy in the future.

Daniel J. Weitzner is co-founder and Director of the MIT CSAIL Decentralized Information Group and former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy. Weitzner’s research group at MIT explores network and Web architectures to enable information privacy accountability. Over the course of his career in the public policy world he has led legislative and judicial efforts resulting in the first Internet free expression protections in the United States and updated privacy and civil liberties protections in the realm of government surveillance. His work at the White House led to a new Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in the US and an agreement among 34 nations at the OECD for protection of Internet free expression and privacy.

The lecture takes place at 6 pm in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre (67/1027). No tickets are required and all are welcome. Refreshments will be available in the Nightingale Building from 5.30 pm.

This Distinguished Lecture is organized by the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.

The University of Southampton has been awarded a rare professorship, bestowed by The Queen, to mark its excellence in the field of Computer Science.

Southampton is one of a handful of universities to receive the prestigious title Regius Professor which reflects the institution’s exceptionally high quality of teaching and research. The University will assign the title to an existing Professor or will appoint a new professor to take the chair and hold the title.

When universities were invited to apply, six new Regius Professorships had been planned to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. However, Southampton’s winning submission and those of 11 other universities were judged by the panel to have been of exceptionally high quality and government Ministers and The Queen agreed that twelve should be awarded. Before today, the awarding of Regius Professorships were limited to a handful of the ancient universities of the United Kingdom and Ireland, namely Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Trinity College, Dublin.

University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Don Nutbeam says: “We are incredibly proud of the recognition that this award of Regius Professor brings to the pioneering work of our computer scientists over many decades. The University of Southampton continues to set the standard as one of the leading places in the world for computing science research and education, as our academics and researchers continue to blaze a trail for the future exploration of computing, intelligent systems and the World Wide Web.â€?

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences and former Head of Electronics and Computer Science, says: “This is a fantastic honour for us. It pays tribute to the many people who have supported the development of Computer Science at Southampton over the years including Vice Chancellors, Heads of Department and the many amazing academics, researchers and students who have contributed so much to enable us to obtain the world-leading position we are in today.“

During the last 26 years, Computer Science at the University of Southampton has grown in scale and global eminence, attracting students and researchers from around the world, providing academic leadership and continuing to define and develop new leading-edge technologies and approaches.

Computer Science was established as an academic discipline at Southampton in 1986 when the University created a joint department of Electronics and Computer Science. This union of the fledgling Department of Computation (founded in 1967 by Professor David Barron), with Southampton’s Electronics Department, whose pioneering achievements were already transforming global communications, propelled research and teaching in Computer Science at Southampton to the world-leading status it enjoys today.

Southampton’s world-leading achievements in Computer Science include the development of pioneering hypermedia systems in the late 1980s and laying the foundations of agent-based computing and intelligent systems since the late 1990s. The University is also recognised around the globe for founding and fostering Web Science as an academic discipline, led by Professors Dame Wendy Hall, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Nigel Shadbolt, who Chairs the UK’s new Open Data Institute.

The Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, says: “I was incredibly impressed by the quality and range of the applications received and I am delighted that twelve new Regius Professorships are to be created. Together, the successful applications demonstrated an exceptionally high level of achievement in both teaching and research.

"It is testament to the quality and strength of our higher education sector that so many universities were considered worthy of such a distinguished honour."

The creation of Regius Professorships falls under the Royal Prerogative, and each appointment is approved by the Monarch on ministerial advice. Only two others have been awarded in the last century, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 2009. Before then, the most recent Regius Professorship was created by Queen Victoria.

The 12 new Regius Professorships awarded by the government are:

• University of Dundee – Life Sciences • Imperial College, London – Engineering • London School of Economics and Political Science – Economics • The Open University – Open Education • University of Manchester – Physics • Royal Holloway, University of London – Music • University of Essex – Political Science • King’s College London – Psychiatry • University of Reading – Meteorology and Climate Science • University of Southampton – Computer Science • University of Surrey – Electronic Engineering • University of Warwick – Mathematics

Students at the Universities of Southampton, Trondheim and Kaiserslautern are taking part in the EMECS-thon 48-hour Embedded Systems Marathon competition this weekend.

The three universities are all part of the prestigious European Masters programme in Embedded Computer Systems. The participating teams of up to three students have 48 hours to develop an embedded systems project from scratch. Each team has the flexibility to choose a project topic of their own interest.

The event takes place simultaneously in the fully-equipped laboratories of each university, with the Southampton event taking place in the Zepler Building computer lab. The students think, build, and even 'eat' embedded systems - since all meals are provided to enable innovation to take place uninterrupted!

Sponsors of this year's event are: ARM, Xilinx, Fachschaft EIT, the Electronics and Computer Science Society at Southampton, and the University Consortium.

The final gala event with prizegiving takes place across Europe on Sunday 3 December at 5 pm (UK time).

A new initiative is aiming to increase the well-being and physical activity of staff and students at the University of Southampton.

The GofIT challenge, which has been developed by Electronics and Computer Science’s new Human Performance Design Lab, Sport and Wellbeing, the Faculty of Medicine, Students’ Union and Vice Chancellor’s office, proposes to increase mobility and activity options on campus. The initiative is also planned for trials later this spring with both Imperial College and schools across the region.

Following a successful trial in October last year, the 12-week challenge starts from 5 February for teams to sign up and 18 February for the trial to start. Teams of five to eight people can sign up to a web-based challenge site, where the goal is simply to increase minutes of physical activity each week. Participants have weekly minute targets to increase physical activity and wellbeing, which can be as simple and as easy as taking the stairs instead of the lift or getting off at a further bus stop and walking a bit more into work. To make achieving those targets a little more fun, teams will easily be able to compete with each other over the weeks.

Teams can sign up now at https://gofit.soton.ac.uk/

Professor mc schraefel from Electronics and Computer Science, who designed GofIT based on MIT’s successful 12 week team challenge, says: “There are sufficient studies now to show that more active, mobile knowledge workers like our students and staff perform better academically and professionally, and are ill less often. Therefore, helping our students and the whole University community get and stay more mobile is an important goal.â€?

Another aspect of the GoFit13 Challenge says Professor schraefel will be building knowledge about health practices. “Working with Sport and Wellbeing, we have experts contributing their knowledge to resources for participants. Being a place of science and learning, we’re also including “Experiments in a boxâ€? where participants can – if they wish – test for themselves how certain healthy activities affect wellbeing. The green box experiment, for instance, is about exploring the effect of eating more greens; the black box experiment is about exploring sleep, and there’s a white box experiment about the testing the effects of starchy carbs, like breads and pasta and potatoes. We’re all a little different, so each of these two-week self-experiments is designed to self-test how these practices affect our weight, our daily energy, our sense of well being when combined with our movement minutes.â€?

The GofIT challenge takes a dual physical and digital approach over a 24-month project with four phases, including capturing reusable health information about the area.

“We’re keen to build a health map of the area, so that people who find a great place to run that’s safe or super place to grab a healthy salad will be able to share these resources,â€? adds Professor schraefel.

The final phase will look to develop physical fit stations on campus and integration of digital and physical infrastructure. Professor schraefel says:“Imagine being at a pull up station on campus and simply by bringing up the GoFIT app, you’ll see how many pull ups were last done at the station, what the daily record is, how often your team has been there, and of course, how many minutes you’ve spent moving there.â€?

ECS students produced a Home Recommender system for webpages, sponsored by Imagination Technologies, as part of this year’s Group Design Project.

The Group Design Project comprises the first half of the final-year of the Master of Engineering degree in Electronics and Computer Science. Working intensively in groups of four of five, the students aim to produce a working system for their industrial sponsor. This year Imagination Technologies asked their group to produce a Home Recommender system which would analyse Web traffic on a home network and, based on the webpages visited, suggest new relevant webpages that people might be interested in (similar to Amazon’s ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ system).

The students were able to use Imagination’s latest Minimorph and FlowWorld technologies, along with the accompanying software. They were also able to experience producing a real-world system, using technology that has been deployed in millions of shipped products.

The Minimorph ran an HTTP proxy server that performed word-frequency analysis on the webpages accessed by the users on the home network. The output of the analysis was then sent to an external server which trawled websites like BBC and Wikipedia, and performed word-frequency analysis on the webpages found. The word-frequency results from the Minimorph were then compared against the results from the trawled websites to find the top matching webpages. These URLs were put on to FlowWorld which was then accessed by the Minimorph and the links displayed back to the user.

The students, Jack Andrew, James Justin, Peter Halles, Rajan Soni and Aljay Massiah, describe the process in the project video.

Imagination Technologies have sponsored a Group Design Project for a number of years, with students working on audio fingerprinting, JPEG encoding or decoding, and motion JPEG. Imagination Technologies were very pleased with the success of the project, and the fact that the students were able to produce a fully working system. The project was supervised in ECS by Dr Denis Nicole.

More information about the project, and about the Minimorph and FlowWorld technologies, is available on Imagination Technologies website.

The Group Design Project runs from October to December each year. Initial expressions of interest in sponsoring a project should be made by the end of May and companies interested in sponsoring a project can contact Joyce Lewis for more information.

Researchers in ECS are among a team from the University of Southampton involved in a national project that is transforming the way gas, electric, water and telecommunications pipes and cables are laid, repaired and replaced in the UK.

Academics from the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, and Electronics and Electrical Engineering, join a team from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), to work with colleagues from the Universities of Birmingham, Bath, Leeds and Sheffield on the Mapping the Underworld project.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council-funded scheme is looking to develop a multi-sensor platform that can locate, map in 3-D and record the position of all buried utility assets without excavation.

Currently it is estimated four million holes are dug each year to lay, repair or remove buried pipes and cables, however, if utility companies are not certain where they are, excavations can result in serious problems such as burst water mains and major disruption to services.

The Mapping the Underworld project aims to come up with new ways to accurately track the exact location of buried pipes and cables using ground penetrating radar, low frequency electro magnetics, vibro-acoustics and magnetic field technologies.

The multi-disciplinary research has already received interest from a number of utility companies and is coming to the end of its second four year phase. The team, led by Professor Chris Rogers from the University of Birmingham, now hopes to secure further funding to extend their work to assess the condition of buried pipes and cables so that utility companies will know which may need replacing without digging them up.

For more information on Mapping the Underworld go to www.mappingtheunderworld.ac.uk

Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Dame Helen Alexander head a list of luminaries from the University of Southampton to be named as part of the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour ‘Power List’.

Dame Wendy, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences, and Dame Helen, the University’s Chancellor, are joined on the list by Southampton alumni Justine Greening MP, Secretary of State for International Development; Clare Foges, Speechwriter to the Prime Minister; and Rosemary Squire OBE, Joint Chief-Executive of the Ambassador Theatre Group; and honorary graduate Shami Chakrabarti, Director of the human rights organisation Liberty. The Woman’s Hour Power List celebrates the achievements of British women across public life, focusing on the top female politicians, business women and leaders in their field from areas as diverse as finance, education, health, engineering and the arts. A Woman’s Hour judging panel sought to name the women who have the biggest impact in society who also have the ability to inspire change as a role model or thinker.

Only last November, Dame Wendy was named to Computer Weekly’s ‘UKtech50’ list of top CIOs, industry executives, public servants and business leaders driving the role of technology in the UK economy. Earlier last year, she was also named as the second most influential woman in UK IT, also awarded by Computer Weekly.

Dame Wendy says: “I'm delighted to have made the list. I love the way it highlights the increasingly significant role women play in every walk of life in the UK and I'm flattered to have been included in such distinguished company.â€?

For the full ‘Power List’ visit the BBC website.

This year’s Engineering and Technology Careers Fair was a resounding success with more than 1,000 students attending to find out more about career options from 80 of the UK’s leading companies.

The Fair attracted major employers across the technology industries, transport, energy, media, finance, gaming, retail, security and communications.

The annual Careers Fair is the centrepiece of the careers and employability activity in Physical and Applied Sciences, and has been running since 2008. The first event attracted 23 companies and it has grown year on year – an excellent indication of the continuing strong demand for Southampton graduates.

Many companies attend every year, but new companies attending the Fair for the first time this year included industry leaders such as Amazon, Gazprom, Hawk-Eye, Huddle, Lockheed Martin, Meggitt, NVIDIA, and notonthehighstreet.com.

“The Fair is a great endorsement of the high regard that the UK’s leading technology companies have for Southampton students,â€? said Careers Fair Director Joyce Lewis. “We had 80 companies attending this year – a significant increase from last year, and it was fantastic to hear the buzz in both venues and to see the great interactions taking place between the company representatives – many of whom were Southampton alumni – and students across all years and many subject areas.

“We’ve had excellent feedback from the companies, who are already looking forward to returning for next year’s event.â€?

Other careers and employability activities organised by FPAS throughout the year include the Careers Hub website ,conferences, employer presentations and mentoring programmes, designed to ensure students are aware of all the opportunities open to them and are best prepared to gain the position they want.

For further information about the ECS Careers Hub and 2014 Fair (11 February 2014), contact Joyce Lewis.

A new initiative is aiming to increase the well-being and physical activity of staff and students at the University of Southampton.

The GofIT challenge proposes to increase mobility and activity options on campus. The initiative is also planned for trials later this spring with both Imperial College and schools across the region.

Following a successful trial in October last year, the 12-week challenge starts from 5 February for teams to sign up and 18 February for the trial to start. Teams of five to eight people can sign up to a web-based challenge site, where the goal is simply to increase minutes of physical activity each week. Participants have weekly minute targets to increase physical activity and wellbeing, which can be as simple and as easy as taking the stairs instead of the lift or getting off at a further bus stop and walking a bit more into work. To make achieving those targets a little more fun, teams will easily be able to compete with each other over the weeks.

Teams can sign up now at https://gofit.soton.ac.uk/auth/login

Professor mc schraefel from Electronics and Computer Science, who designed GofIT based on MIT’s successful 12 week team challenge, says: “There are sufficient studies now to show that more active, mobile knowledge workers like our students and staff perform better academically and professionally, and are ill less often. Therefore, helping our students and the whole University community get and stay more mobile is an important goal.â€?

Another aspect of the GoFit13 Challenge says Professor schraefel will be building knowledge about health practices. “Working with Sport and Wellbeing, we have experts contributing their knowledge to resources for participants. Being a place of science and learning, we’re also including “Experiments in a boxâ€? where participants can – if they wish – test for themselves how certain healthy activities affect wellbeing. The green box experiment, for instance, is about exploring the effect of eating more greens; the black box experiment is about exploring sleep, and there’s a white box experiment about the testing the effects of starchy carbs, like breads and pasta and potatoes. We’re all a little different, so each of these two-week self-experiments is designed to self-test how these practices affect our weight, our daily energy, our sense of well being when combined with our movement minutes.â€?

The GofIT challenge takes a dual physical and digital approach over a 24-month project with four phases, including capturing reusable health information about the area.

“We’re keen to build a health map of the area, so that people who find a great place to run that’s safe or super place to grab a healthy salad will be able to share these resources,â€? adds Professor schraefel.

The final phase will look to develop physical fit stations on campus and integration of digital and physical infrastructure. Professor schraefel says:“Imagine being at a pull up station on campus and simply by bringing up the GoFIT app, you’ll see how many pull ups were last done at the station, what the daily record is, how often your team has been there, and of course, how many minutes you’ve spent moving there.â€?

Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is throwing open its doors to potential postgraduate taught students at our MSc Open Day in March.

This is an opportunity for interested students to come and explore the campus, see the excellent facilities that ECS has to offer and find out about our range of one year postgraduate Master of Science courses.

This year’s MSc Open Day takes place on Wednesday, 20 March, at the Highfield Campus, and visitors will get the chance to hear academics talk about the variety of MSc programmes in ECS, learn about what studying an MSc involves and find out about developing a research career. Current MSc students will also be on hand to chat about their experiences and there will be opportunities to ask questions of our world-leading academics at the cutting edge of their disciplines.

The day starts at 10.30am and runs until 4.30pm and includes tours of some of ECS’s outstanding facilities including the high voltage electrical labs, computing suites, award-winning clean rooms and electronics labs, as well as a look at the accommodation available for postgraduate students.

“Deciding to study for an MSc is a big step. By coming to our Open Day you can hear about all our programmes, talk to current students and get the information you need to make the right decision,â€? said Head of ECS Professor Neil White.

To book a place on the ECS MSc Open Day go to www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/postgraduatetaught/openday_booking

To find out more about the postgraduate taught courses go to www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/postgraduatetaught