To celebrate its 60th anniversary, 60 of the University of Southampton's leading research successes have been chosen to illustrate the variety of research activities taking place across its Faculties, institutes and academic departments.

"60@60" successes from the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences include:

Improving coordination in a crisis. Professor Nick Jennings, who leads the University's Agents, Interactions and Complexity research group, has pioneered research into the use of agent technology in decentralized information systems, such as disaster scenarios. “Computers are much better than people at collecting and analysing large amounts of information,” says Professor Jennings, which is why he aims to produce systems where computers work together, negotiate priorities, and share information. Professor Jennings is currently leading the ORCHID project, which aims to advance research in the area of human-agent collectives. Exploring deep space. The LOFAR (low frequency array) telescope in Chilbolton, Hampshire is part of a Europe-wide network of telescopes using low-frequency radio waves to generate high-resolution images of space. Professor Rob Fender (Astronomy), who is leading the development of the UK telescope, says: "The quality of the images produced by LOFAR will help scientists to understand the fundamentals of astrophysics - the birth and life-cycle of stars and galaxies and the ultimate end points of stars and black holes."

Innovative research into dielectric materials. The Tony Davis High Voltage Laboratory is a unique facility that undertakes research in power engineering. “Elements of our work have been used internationally, and we have been invited to work with leading laboratories in Europe and China,” says Professor Paul Lewin, Director of the Lab. Research carried out in the Lab contributes to the maintenance of electrical infrastructure; helps to avoid costly equipment failures and develops more efficient ways to distribute power from renewable sources. Intelligent insulation that changes colour under high voltage is also being researched at the University of Southampton, as well as nanodielectrics and liquid dielectrics.

Advancing our knowledge of the oceans. As part of a long-standing collaboration between ECS and the National Oceanography Centre Southampton (NOCS), new technology has been developed in research projects led by Professor Hywel Morgan and Dr Matt Mowlem, including tiny sensors that can perform operations traditionally performed in a laboratory. These sensors can measure salinity, dissolved oxygen levels, temperature, chemicals, nutrients and pollutions, meaning that they can help scientists to collect important information about the complex ocean environment. These ‘lab-on-a-chip’ sensors are being developed for use commercially, and could be used to monitor pollution in lakes and rivers.

Opening up government data. Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS have been working with the UK government to create data.gov.uk - a website designed to make government information freely available to the public. Information about education, traffic, taxes and crime is available, and can be used to create new software tools. Professor Shadbolt says: "Open data allows people to hold governments to account and improve public services. It is exciting to see Southampton taking a lead in the higher education sector."

Driving global advances in communication. Phototonics research, led by Professor David Payne of the Optoelectronics Research Centre is driving global advances in communications. “The whole global internet relies on our invention of erbium-doped fibre amplifiers that amplify optical signals to allow fast telecommunications,” says Professor Payne. The ORC has developed special optical fibres for a range of uses – from high-powered lasers for machining to the Moon Rover.

The University will be celebrating these achievements on Saturday 30th June, with a Community Open Day on the Highfield Campus from 10.30 am to 4 pm.

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

A PhD student from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science is celebrating after scooping an international award for his paper at a large technical conference in the USA.

Jatin Mistry beat off fellow researchers from around the world to claim the award for best Technical Paper at the Synopsys Users Group (SNUG) conference in Silicon Valley.

Synopsys is a world leader in electronic design automation (EDA) and every year holds a forum in San Francisco featuring exceptional technical presentations from designers and engineers at the cutting edge of electronic product design and manufacturing. This year the conference attracted more than 2,300 delegates.

Jatin’s paper, written in collaboration with James Myers and David Flynn (ARM), was awarded the Technical Committee Award - the first time that this award has been given for research work that has been carried out in academia.

The paper details Jatin's research progress on reducing the energy consumed by digital electronics powered by energy harvested from the environment.

“It was fantastic to get the award which shows recognition for the quality of the work that I am doing. It is a very strong industry and, because SNUG is an industrial conference, this award will hopefully encourage others to submit academic research-related papers to conferences like this where you are face to face with leaders in the electronics industry.

“It gives more exposure to your work and also promotes strong industrial partnerships such as we have in ECS with ARM at Cambridge,” said Jatin.

Jatin is working on his PhD, funded by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) as part of the Holistic Energy Harvesting project in collaboration with ARM. He recently spent a three-month internship at ARM evaluating the energy-saving methods for embedded processors used in mobile devices which are described in his winning paper.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Jatin's PhD supervisor and Associate Dean for Research in Physical and Applied Sciences, said: “This award is another example of the relevance of the cutting-edge research that our researchers and the Pervasive Systems Centre are carrying out in energy-efficient embedded systems and in collaboration with our long-term industrial partner ARM.”

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

Undergraduate students in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are embarking on adventures across the globe this summer with financial support from ECS alumni.

The donations from alumni to the ECS Student Development Fund are enabling students to follow their interests across a wide range of activities. Grants from the Fund were open to application from all undergraduate students, and were awarded on the criteria of activities that are charitable or educational, that advance personal development, or will be of value to the broader community.

One of the most ambitious activities is the Mongolia Charity Rally. A team of seven students, from ECS and Geophysics, were granted an award towards a 10,000-mile journey this summer, from Southampton to Ulaanbaatar. The students left Southampton on Saturday 7 July and will travel through 22 countries to deliver two ambulances to the people of Mongolia. When they arrive in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, they will donate the ambulances and other medical equipment to Go Help, a charity which works with local communities in Central Asia to improve access to education and healthcare facilities.

“Useful patient transport in Mongolia is in incredibly short supply," says Alex Forward, one of the students in this team, "made worse by the country’s poor road conditions. We are working directly with the charity Go Help to ensure the vehicles are put to immediate use after we deliver them.” The students' progress can be tracked on their website.

Electrical Engineering student Alex Coleman Cole has received £500 towards an expedition to the Fiji Islands. While there, Alex aims to help members of the local community by volunteering at a local school to teach English. He will also assist with construction projects on a primary school and water tanks. He also hopes to learn about the sea turtle conservation programme and swim with sharks and manta rays.

A group of four students will be cycling from London to Budapest in August. The journey of over 1200 miles takes in eight countries, and the team aims to complete the ride in 25 days.

Students have also been granted awards to provide backstage support for University of Southampton productions at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; to volunteer at the Game Developers’ Conference in Germany, and to teach at a mission in the Philippines. A computer science student has also received funding to help set up an online support network for Libyan students in the UK.

Professor Neil White, Head of ECS, commented: “These are fantastic opportunities for our students, and I wish them the best of luck with their different endeavours. ECS and our students are very grateful to ECS alumni for their support which has made a significant difference to our students' abilities to undertake these challenging activities."

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

See also: ECS Alumni Network on LinkedIn

An innovative activity to encourage girls to consider careers in computer science has been designed at ECS (Electronics and Computer Science) for an event held this week at IBM, Hursley. The ECS activity was part of Think.IT, a two-day event organised by IBM and designed to encourage secondary school girls to continue studying computing, engineering, technology, and science, and to consider careers in the IT industry. The girls, aged 11 to 14, were drawn from 10 different schools in Hampshire and surrounding counties. A team from ECS, led by Dr Reena Pau and Dr Yvonne Howard, organised a drama-based activity which enabled the girls to learn about leading figures in the development of computer science. The girls were challenged to create short plays about famous female computer scientists – including Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Mandy Chessell, and Professor Dame Wendy Hall (ECS).

The girls were also asked to outline their vision of the future of computer science and technology, including new inventions they would love to have. These ideas included hologram people, a super-watch, and a way for thoughts to appear on paper without writing.

The girls’ responses to the activity were enthusiastic: “I’m really glad I came,” “It was great fun,” and “I really enjoyed it," were just some of the comments made on the day.

Dr Reena Pau, who devised the activity theme, commented: “The girls loved it because it brought women’s contributions to technology alive.”

Both IBM and ECS are committed to encouraging girls to choose STEM subjects for careers, and to increasing the number of girls studying STEM subjects at university.

A team of academics from the University of Southampton is set to take on the rest of the English Fantasy Football League when the new Barclays Premier League season kicks off next month. Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn, Lecturer in Computer Science; PhD student Tim Matthews; and George Chalkiadakis, visiting researcher at the University of Southampton, have developed an artificial soccer manager that in tests has ranked, on average, in the top one per cent of the 2.5 million players in the official English Fantasy Football League, run by the Barclays Premier League. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) software uses an extensive series of algorithms to analyse players’ performances and statistics before picking its football team each week. It goes into much more depth than any dedicated fantasy football player and so far its performance has been shown to be a runaway success. The team, based in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, developed the software as part of Tim’s dissertation for his Master of Artificial Intelligence degree in 2011. A paper based on Tim’s work was subsequently accepted to be presented at a major Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI, 2012) in Toronto later this month. The team have already tested their software by running a controlled experiment seeing how it would have performed in last year’s Premier League Fantasy Football League and at one point it managed to finish in the top 500 players. However, this year they are planning to enter it for real to see how it fares against its human competitors, but also in collaboration with human players. Until now the team have just used the AI software-controlled machine, but this year they will introduce a human element in the hope of improving their record still further. “Our previous tests have shown that a machine working on its own will perform better than millions of humans. But a machine can’t take into consideration if a player is injured (and still plays), has low morale or has personal issues and may not perform at his best,” says Dr Ramchurn. “So this time we will be using humans and the machine working together as a team so that the humans can add this subtle information into the system and, together with the software’s extensive analysis, it will hopefully improve the machine’s success rate, though in some cases, this could also potentially make it perform worse if humans put in inaccurate information,” he adds. The team are currently working on a web application that will allow next season’s players to get advice from the artificial manager and to play against it.

Over 200 students will attend Graduation ceremonies on Thursday 19 July to receive University of Southampton degrees gained in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.

The students will graduate at two ceremonies to be held in the Turner Sims Concert Hall: at 9.30 am for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering; and at 4.45 pm for degrees in Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations. The ceremonies will be followed at around 11 am and 6 pm by Graduation Receptions for graduates and their guests, to be held in the University's Reception Marquee, which is situated in front of the Students' Union.

Professor Neil White, Head of ECS, will welcome the new graduates to the community of ECS Alumni, and will say: "All of us who know ECS know that it is a unique place and that it is the members of our community who make it so. For the last three or four years you have been an integral part of that community as much as any of the researchers and teachers whose work contributes to our international reputation." Graduates can keep in touch with ECS by joining the LinkedIn group 'ECS Alumni, University of Southampton' and though the University of Southampton alumni database.

The majority of students graduating from ECS have already found excellent graduate jobs in the technology industry. Impressive employability figures for ECS graduates were a strong contributing factor in ECS's outstanding league table results this year (Electronics and Electrical Engineering is ranked 1st and 2nd in the UK in recent league tables (The Guardian and The Times May/June 2010) and Computer Science and IT is ranked 3th and 7th), and with many companies already booking for the next ECS Careers Fair on 12 February 2013, prospects for future graduates also look excellent.

Many congratulations to all new ECS graduates!

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

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton, has been named as the second most influential woman in UK IT in a poll published in Computer Weekly.

Dame Wendy joins 24 other women who, according to Computer Weekly, represent role models who have an important role to play in the future diversity and success of the high-tech community.

“I'm delighted and flattered to have been included in such a distinguished list and I applaud Computer Weekly for their efforts to highlight the role of women in IT in the UK which is far more significant than is often realised,” said Dame Wendy.

“Such publicity will encourage others to consider careers in an industry that is one of the most exciting and important to be in today,” she added.

Dame Wendy has held many leadership roles in addition to her academic research in computer science, in the development of the World Wide Web and, more recently, in establishing and developing the new discipline of Web Science.

With Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Dame Wendy co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006. She is currently a Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science.

Amongst the roles Dame Wendy has held are: President of the British Computer Society; the first non-North American to lead the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest organisation for computer professionals; a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology; Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering; and a member of the Research Council of the European Research Council.

This summer, she has also received honorary degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Queen's University in Belfast, and the University of Birmingham.

Research on drone technology and disaster management led by Professor Nick Jennings and highlighted by the BBC could prove vital in improving the response of emergency services and populations to disaster management.

The technology being developed by Professor Jennings and his research team in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, in association with BAE Systems and other collaborators, forms part of the large-scale ORCHID research project. This project evolved from the successful ALADDIN research collaboration which used agent technology to aid decision-making in decentralized, distributed information systems, such as the aftermath of a disaster.

Professor Jennings talked to the BBC about how the drones (autonomous flying vehicles) will be used: "Humans can do things like fill in maps based on what they see, starting from a blank map, which is exactly what happened in Haiti. What buildings are damaged, where facilities are, that kind of basic crowd-sourcing already happens.

"But we want to augment that with autonomous flying vehicles that are able to get a view of the bigger picture on the ground, to improve situational awareness. They can figure out where the disaster responders should go, where the resources should go."

In Professor Jennings' proposed system, UAVs will be launched immediately to monitor the unfolding disaster from the air. According to the BBC, what makes Prof Jennings's research stand out is that he is interested in allowing drones to fly as squadrons, improvising their own flight paths as a unit in response to new information, without human intervention.

"The underlying research is based on aspects of artificial intelligence, getting software to do clever things, and underpinning that is a form of mathematics", explains Professor Jennings.

The teams of drones that will patrol a disaster have already been tested extensively in Sydney, Australia, and Professor Jennings tells the BBC that a fully operational system will be ready in about 18 months.

BBC Technology: Disaster drones: How robot teams can help in a crisis

Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have devised a novel method for forming virtual power plants to provide renewable energy production in the UK.

The results of their work, which presents a new mechanism for integrating small renewable sources into the Grid, are currently being presented to the prestigious AAAI Conference being held this week in Toronto.

In the last decade, small and distributed energy resources (DERs), such as wind farms and solar panels, have begun to appear in greater numbers in the electricity supply network (Grid). To ensure that energy demand is met without interruptions, the Grid requires power suppliers to provide an estimate of their production and the confidence in meeting that estimate. Depending on the confidence placed on the estimates, the Grid is able to choose the appropriate number of conventional generators needed to produce and supply energy whenever it is needed - the more accurate the provided estimates, and the higher the confidence placed in those estimates, the better for the Grid scheduling activities. Although the deployment of DERs could reduce reliance on conventional power plants, their integration into the Grid is problematic, since the DERs, given their small size, are largely ‘invisible’ to the Grid. Even if visible, the uncertainty and uncontrollability of renewable energy sources prevents individual DERs from profitably dealing with the Grid directly, or participating in the wholesale electricity market because they are often unable to meet the set generation targets.

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are fast emerging as a suitable means of integrating DERs into the Grid. They are formed via the aggregation of a large number of such DERs, enabling them to reach similar size and supply reliability as conventional power plants. In a new study, ECS researchers promote the formation of such ‘cooperative’ VPPs (CVPPs) using intelligent and multi-agent software systems. In particular, they designed a payment mechanism that encourages DERs to join CVPPs with large overall production. Dr Valentin Robu, from the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group, who worked on the study, says: “There is considerable talk about how to integrate a large number of small, renewable sources into the grid in a more efficient and cost- effective way, as current feed-in tariffs, that simply reward production, are expensive and ineffective. “CVPPs that together have a higher total production and, crucially, can average out prediction errors is a promising solution, which does not require expensive additional infrastructure, just intelligent incentives.” By using a mathematical technique called proper scoring rules - a measure of the performance of an entity, be it person or machine, which repeatedly makes decisions under uncertainty) - intelligent software agents, representing the individual DERs, are incentivised to report accurate estimates of their electricity production. The researchers devised a scoring rules-based payment mechanism that incentivises the provision of accurate predictions from the CVPPs - and in turn, the member DERs - which aids in the planning of the supply schedule at the Grid. The mechanism guarantees that DERs are rewarded for providing estimates that are both accurate and have a high confidence, ensuring that software agents are given credit for high probability estimates that are close to the realised ones. Dr Robu adds: “Scoring rules with specific incentive properties have long been used to design payment mechanisms that incentivise agents to report private probabilistic predictions truthfully and to the best of their forecasting abilities. “We show that our mechanism incentivises real DERs to form CVPPs, and outperforms the current state of the art payment mechanism developed for this problem.” The researchers collected half-hourly wind-speed data for a 10-week period from 16 commercial wind farms in the UK in order to validate their approach. They will be presenting their paper at the AAAI conference (22-26 July), in Toronto, Canada this week. The Southampton researchers have been exploring these ideas for some time through the iDEaS project, an industrially-funded project, which aims to explore the issues associated with the decentralised control, operation and management of future generation electricity networks. The other members of the research team are Dr Ramachandra Kota and Dr Georgios Chalkiadakis. The project is led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, had a special role at the spectacular opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday 27 July.

In the part of the show that paid homage to the UK’s role in industrial innovation, Sir Tim was seen sitting at a computer screen, as the World Wide Web was acknowledged to have brought people together and provided unimagined opportunities for the world’s communications and creative industries.

Sir Tim’s live tweet: ‘This is for everyone’, appeared around the stadium as members of the audience displayed the words on pixelated light pads.

Sir Tim has held a Chair of Computer Science in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, since 2004. He is 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the World Wide Web Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and holds the Order of Merit (OM).

It was in 1991, when he was working at CERN in Geneva that he unveiled the world's first Web page. Sir Tim made the Web publicly available - a novel way of sharing documents in a global information space, free of charge for anyone to use.

Computer Science at Southampton has been closely involved in the development of the Web from the earliest days of its existence, and the Web has formed a major part of its research efforts. ECS-Electronics and Computer Science has been a world-leader in Open Access - the global initiative to have all the world's research freely available on the Web - as the first academic institution in the world to adopt an Open Access mandate (2001). ECS also has been at the forefront of the development of the Semantic Web and more recently of the movement towards linked open data. The Web Science Trust was launched at Southampton in 2009, and from 2013 it will be possible to study Web Science at Southampton as an undergraduate degree.

Sir Tim and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, also at ECS, and Head of the Web and Internet Science research group, are co-directors of the UK's new Open Data Institute, which aims to ensure that the benefits and potential of open data are shared by the UK’s business community.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton, said: "We're thrilled to see Sir Tim take centre stage during the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympic Games. When he first demonstrated his new ideas in the early 1990s, few could predict that the World Wide Web would become the dominant and universal information system we all use today. At the time, only a few visionaries had it in mind that this new innovation would fundamentally change our lives so much.”