In Autumn 2013 Electronics and Computer Science will run its first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This will enable anyone to study online, for free, wherever they are in the world a leading subject from ECS, in conjunction with our partner FutureLearn - part of the Open University.
A MOOC is a free study programme which is designed to be studied online by large numbers of participants. In addition to traditional course materials - online video lectures, reading material, coursework and tests - MOOCs provide interactive forums that help students and tutors build an online community around areas of interest.
The University of Southampton has been busy working with the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) and other teams across the University to develop our first MOOC which will be delivered on the newly launched FutureLearn platform alongside other Universities and content providers like the British Library and the British Council. These exciting opportunities can be taken as a taster for further study or just to learn more about a subject of interest from a potentially massive international audience.
The aim is to give people access to education without the need for prior subject knowledge, just enthusiasm and a willingness to engage around topic areas that interest them or may help them develop their skills.
Courses will cover a range of topics, each requiring two to three hours of study per week. Participants can either choose to complete the whole programme, or elect to dip into particular topics of interest as and when time allows.
The University plans to launch its first few MOOCs in leading subject areas including a major archaeological dig and an emerging Computer Science discipline we are pioneering in ECS, drawing on our world-leading expertise in the field.
If you would like to know more about our MOOCs, FutureLearn and what course we will be launching first, register your interest and select the option "Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths".
What a year it has been so far. The first half of 2013 has been a huge success for Electronics and Computer Science with national and international recognition for our academics and our research.
Honorary degrees, Queenâs birthday honours, Academy awards and substantial funding allocations show that across the board we are leading the field in Electronics and Computer Science.
Among the notable achievements of 2013 so far are:
Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering Professor Dame Wendy Hall has been recognised for her contribution to computing and information technology in a number of ways.
She has received an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Sussex for her work in multimedia and hypermedia and the influence of her work on the development of the Semantic web.
She has also been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from City University London for helping to transform the boundaries and capabilities of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Back in February Dame Wendy was named on BBC Radio 4 Womanâs Hour Power List that celebrates the achievements of British women across public life. She was selected by a judging panel as one of the women who have the biggest impact in society and also have the ability to inspire change as a role model or thinker.
ECS colleague Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the worldâs leading experts in Web Science and the pioneering co-founder of the Open Data Institute (ODI), was knighted in the Queenâs Birthday Honours List for services to science and engineering.
Nigel is Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton and ODI Chairman, and one of the co-creators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science.
Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Associate Dean Research in Physical Sciences and Engineering, was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering for his contribution to low-power design and testing of mobile computing systems. Fellows of the Academy comprise the countryâs most eminent and distinguished engineers and are recognised for their excellence in the science, art and practice of engineering.
Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a leading academic in Web and Internet Science, was one of five joint winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering earlier this year.
The prize, given by The Royal Academy of Engineering, honours Sir Tim for inventing the World Wide Web and is awarded in recognition of outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity.
The worldâs first electricity monitoring clamp designed by ECS engineers was named as joint winner of this yearâs Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs Award.
The device was developed by Dr Reuben Wilcock, Senior Enterprise Fellow and PhD student Robert Rudolf and could enable us to find out which parts of our homes are the most energy-hungry without installing plug-in power monitors on each individual appliance.
The award, that identifies entrepreneurial researchers in UK universities working in electro-technology and at an early stage of their careers, means the pair now have the opportunity to take their multi-core current clamp to market.
ECS recorded outstanding results in one of the UKâs leading university league tables.
In the Guardian University Guide 2014, published in June, the University of Southampton led the table for Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and was ranked in the top five for Computer Science and IT.
At the start of the year the University of Southampton was 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 institutionâs exceptionally high quality of teaching and research.
ECS has been recognised for its work tackling the problem of gender inequality in science with an Athena SWAN Bronze Award.
The Athena SWAN Charter was set up in 2005 and acknowledges the commitment of the higher education sector to address gender inequalities, tackle the unequal representation of women in science and to improve career progression for female academics.
ECS joins other University departments including Chemistry, Medicine and Ocean and Earth Science to receive the bronze award this year. The University of Southampton has received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award since 2006.
ECS researchers are part of an interdisciplinary research collaboration that has been awarded a £12m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop a 24/7 digital home health assistant.
The University of Southampton joins the University of Reading, Bristol City Council, IBM, Toshiba and Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), in the Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) project that will be led by the University of Bristol.
As part of this five-year project the ECS team from the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Group will be exploring ways in which energy can be supplied to body worn devices without the need for batteries.
ECS will play a key role in a national collaboration of electronic engineers and computer scientists aiming to develop the next generation of energy-efficient computing systems.
Associate Dean Research Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi is Director of PRiME: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems, that brings together four world-leading research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Imperial College, Manchester and Newcastle. The five-year £5.6m Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project will undertake creative research into the design and implementation of energy-efficient and dependable embedded systems with many-core processors.
New students to the University of Southampton will be the first to easily find their way around their new city thanks to a new system based on technology pioneered by Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).
The Live Bus Timetable system available to everyone in the city shows users the location of any landmark, food outlet, pub or bus stop across the city and tells them the buses to use.
All they need to do is type in the name of their required destination and, if they are using a computer the campus they are on (mobile phones use GPS to establish current location) and the service will show them the best way to get there.
The system has been developed by the Universityâs Open Data Service and the work has been spearheaded by Dr Ash Smith, a former ECS Research Fellow who now works for the Universityâs central IT service.
âThe new system has been created using the novel feature of combining information from two different open council datasets â the food hygiene ratings and bus timetable data â together with dbpedia.org, the open data equivalent of Wikipedia. This Live Bus Timetable system is a handy service, especially for freshers, to find the buses they need to catch to where they want to go. It is very simple to use and draws a map of their nearest stop in relation to their current position, as well as giving them a list of all the stops on their route,â? said Ash.
âBy combining these sources of open data we have used it in ways it wasnât initially intended, and have opened up the doors to using open data for a whole range of new applications,â? he added.
Ash completed his PhD at Southampton and is an honorary member of the Web and Internet Science Research Group, based in ECS.
The second international Summerhack event of 2013 took place in Timisoara, Romania, at the end of last month.
StartUp weekends are popular events in ECS and this summer our students have helped bring them to other parts of Europe!
Organized by ECS undergraduate student Vlad Velici, with the support of an impressive group of judges, and ECS students Alejandro Saucedo and Izidor Flajsman, who acted as Mentors, the Summerhacks Timisoara event attracted 20 participants who spent the weekend devising start-ups and coding their apps. Unlike other hack events, Summerhacks wasn't a regular 48-hour hackathon â the emphasis was more on excellent projects rather than 'monetizability'. Competitors were able to hack anything they wanted (as long as it was awesome!) And also unlike most hackathons, the final pitch was not conclusive, since judging criteria was focused on the implementation and technical side of the project â the products/projects were actually tested to see if they worked!
Sabin Marcu, one of the members of the winning team, will be joining ECS this month as an undergraduate student in Computer Science.
ECS students are supported in these endeavours by the ECS Student Development Fund, provided by the generosity of ECS alumni.
This was the second ECS-supported event of the summer - in July another successful ECS-sponsored Hack event was held in Ljubljana.
The University of Southampton is launching the largest photonics and electronics institute in the UK on Thursday 12 September.
The new Zepler Institute is a unique multidisciplinary research centre that brings together world-leading expertise in photonics, advanced materials, quantum technologies and nanoscience.
The Institute will build on the Universityâs pioneering discoveries in photonics and electronics that form the backbone of todayâs global communications infrastructure.
For decades, researchers at Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre have enabled the development of the physical hardware through fibre optic technology that laid the foundations of the Internet, while researchers in Electronics and Computer Science are leading the way in pioneering the new discipline of Web Science to understand and develop the future uses of the World Wide Web.
The Zepler Institute will build on that reputation to provide a collaborative environment for research that will continue to deliver the solutions required to meet the global challenges of the future â from ultra-high bandwidth communication technologies, through bio-photonics for point-of-care diagnostics, to fundamental research into quantum devices and technologies, led by experts in the University's Physics, Quantum Light and Matter group.
The Zepler Institute is led by Professor Sir David Payne, Director of the Universityâs internationally renowned Optoelectronics Research Centre, and one of the worldâs most referenced and influential researchers.
Professor Payne will deliver a special lecture entitled â50 Years of Photonics at the University of Southamptonâ to mark the occasion and in celebration of his recently-awarded Knighthood for services to photonics.
The event will also feature a special guest lecture by Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, who is considered one of the âfathersâ of the Internet. Vint will be introduced by web pioneer Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Professor Hall says: âThe formation of the Zepler Institute ensures that University of Southampton continues to make pioneering breakthroughs and discoveries that will meet societyâs global communication challenges. It also puts us in a leading position to develop the future of the Internet, which is the infrastructure for the World Wide Web."
âFor 60 years Southampton researchers have been at the forefront of the global revolution in digital communications leading the world in web and Internet science, technology and application,â? Professor Hall continues.
In fact, global access to the Internet itself relies almost entirely on Professor Payneâs invention of erbium-doped fibre amplifiers, which has made possible the worldwide information superhighway and high-speed telecommunication networks we often take for granted and which are so important to us all in the 21st century. Every time you use the Internet, your mobile phone or an ATM you are using technology developed at Southampton.
The Zepler Institute is named after Professor Eric Ernest Zepler who founded the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at University College Southampton (now University of Southampton) in 1947, which was the first in Electronics in this country, and probably in the world.
Professor Zepler made an outstanding and pioneering contribution to radio receiver development as well as to the teaching of electronics. From 3pm, researchers from across the Zepler Institute will be showcasing their work and state-of-the-art facilities.
Admission to the showcase and the lectures by Professor Payne and Vint Cerf from 5pm on Thursday, 12 September at the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton is free though places are limited.
To reserve your place, please register online here or for further information please contact events@soton.ac.uk
An outstanding photograph by Emeritus Professor Greg Parker of Electronics and Computer Science is included in an exhibition of the worldâs best scientific photography, sponsored by the Royal Photographic Society and the Science and Facilities Research Council.
Professor Parkerâs image âWater Drop Collision and Bubble Burst 2012â is one of 100 stunning prints showcasing an extraordinary variety of scientific photography â images that explore worlds we can only imagine, or that are used as tools in everyday life in medicine, engineering and other related fields.
Gregâs image shows a water drop collision occurring underneath a bursting soap bubble âthe first water drop enters the water and throws up a column of water that the second (following) water drop collides with. The picture was also featured in last Saturdayâs edition of 'The Times'.
The inaugural showing of the exhibition âInternational Images for Science 2013â runs at the Great North Museum in Newcastle, as part of the British Science Festival until 29 September.The Exhibition will then tour the UK and overseas. The Exhibition was instigated in 2011, to fulfil The Society's remit 'to promote the Art and Science of Photography'.
Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will be showcasing their Cicada Hunt app on the national stage next week.
The team are taking their smartphone app to the British Science Festival, in Newcastle, and the BBC Summer of Wildlife event, at Sutton Park, Birmingham.
The app was developed by ECS researchers was released in June to help search for the rare New Forest cicada (Cicadetta montana) that is the only cicada native to the UK.
Each year during May to July it sings with a very characteristic high-pitched song that is at the limits of human hearing and is particularly difficult for most adults to hear. Sightings of cicada in the New Forest date back to 1812, but it hasnât been spotted or heard from in more than a decade.
Visitors to the new Forest can download the app that turns their mobile into a portable cicada detector to scour the area in search of the elusive creatures. If a potential cicada song is detected the app prompts the user to upload the recording so that it can be analysed in more detail.
Professor Alex Rogers, of the Agents, interaction and Complexity Research Group, leads the project. He said: âWe will be demonstrating our app to visitors to these two prestigious shows.
âSince June we have had more than 1,500 downloads of the app and about 4,000 reports from the New Forest. Unfortunately we didnât detect any cicadas. The cicada season has finished now but there's a good chance that the warm weather this year will make next year an even better opportunity to search.
âWe think it is quite likely that colonies of the cicada remain undiscovered among the less visited parts of the forest. Weâre hoping that the millions of visitors to the New Forest can help us discover any of these colonies.â?
ECS PhD student Davide Zilli who developed the app added: âThe cicada likes sunny south-facing clearings and will only sing on a warm day when there is little wind. We will encourage people to use the app when the conditions are best. We are also using the reports from the app to compile a map of the area that have already been searched in order to focus the efforts of the professional entomologists who are also looking for the cicada.â?
A group of ECS students have launched an innovative online company which offers outstanding opportunities for designers, trend-setters and discriminating consumers.
Garmsby, which has the slogan "designed by you. chosen by the crowd. worn by everyone.", enables aspiring or established designers to submit a t-shirt design to its website, and then uses crowd-sourcing to enable potential consumers to vote on their favourite designs. The most popular designs are then offered for purchase on t-shirts and, hopefully in the future, on other types of garments.
The company is the brainchild of ECS students Adam Adeniran, Marc de Vos, and Jonny Morrice, who had the idea in a Southampton coffee-shop and have been working for the last six months with ECS Business Strategy Advisor to Students, Jason McMahon, to hone the concept.
The site has launched with 10 submitted designs and a two-week voting cycle. The majority of the profits go to the original designer, providing a platform that will help aspiring designers in building their own clothing brands and establishing their careers. But the site is open to anyone who has a design that they would like to see printed on a t-shirt.
The Garmsby team told the Soton Tab: "We are always looking for people to submit more designs - and they can make money if their designs get the most 'likes'."
The team spent the summer preparing for their launch on 2 September and are now hoping that the idea will be supported across the University and beyond.
In Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) our commitment to tackling the problem of gender inequality in science has been strongly maintained since we were awarded the Athena SWAN Bronze.
The Award recognises commitment in the higher education sector to addressing gender inequalities, tackling the unequal representation of women in science and improving career progression for female academics.
The national award reflects the work ECS has done to encourage women into an area that has historically been dominated by males.
In recent years ECS has promoted diversity across its courses and staff, and has set up a Diversity Committee to encourage a supportive and inclusive environment for work and study.
ECS Women was started by students to support women across all levels from undergraduates to researchers. The group takes an active part in conferences promoting females in science and organises events to improve graduatesâ employability.
âSince we received the Bronze Award we have been working on ways in which we can further encourage women into the areas of Electronics and Computer Science,â? said Professor Michael Butler, Chair of the ECS Athena SWAN Team.
âWe appreciate that gaining the Award was only the start and we still have a long way to go. We have already started working on many of the action points we identified to continue our efforts in tackling this problem. We are also working with our colleagues across the University to share our experiences and work together to encourage more women into science.â?
Among the key areas ECS has been focusing on since winning the Award are:
⢠encouraging more female students without standard A-Levels to enter our Foundation programme
⢠encouraging more females to enrol on courses
⢠expanding our outreach activities to encourage more girls to consider Electronics and Computer Science in higher education
⢠increasing recruitment of female academic staff
⢠gaining a better understanding of why many female postgraduates are not applying for research posts and why many Research Fellows are not applying for academic positions
⢠supporting flexible working and family-friendly policies such as career breaks, parental leave and flexible working
⢠supporting career development for women
⢠providing diversity training for all staff
Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Social Sciences, Management and the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) is launching its pioneering first free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) today (September 18th) on Web Science.
The course is a free online study programme that will give people the opportunity to get a taste of Web Science â an innovative, multi-disciplinary area of research that explores the technical and social sides of the Web.
The MOOC is run in partnership with FutureLearn â part of the Open University â and students will explore topics such as what is web science, security and cyber crime, the digital economy and networks.
The University of Southampton is a world leader in Web Science. It offers the subject at undergraduate, postgraduate and research level; is home to the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre; and has created the Web and Internet Science Research Group (WAIS) that is carrying out research to better understand the origin, evolution and growth of the Web and how it is transforming society.
Many of ECSâs academics were involved in developing the Web including Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt. All are still very influential and key players in the continued research and development of the Web and Web Science.
This new MOOC is just one of a number being launched by the University in partnership with FutureLearn- part of the Open University. They are designed to be studied online anywhere in the world by large numbers of people. As well as traditional course materials including online video lectures, reading material, coursework and tests, MOOCs also provide interactive forums that help students and tutors build an online community.
No prior knowledge of the subject is required, but students should have enthusiasm, a willingness to learn more and develop their skills, and be able to study for two to three hours a week. They can either complete the whole programme or dip into particular topics of interest as and when time allows.
