The University of Southampton

Published: 21 March 2014
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It’s been one year since the University of Southampton Malaysia Campus celebrated its official opening and it is reflecting on an amazing year of achievement. The Campus, at the EduCity@Iskandar in Johor represents a major strategic development for the University.

The future looks exciting for the Malaysia Campus, with industries across Electrical and Electronic Engineering, as well as Mechanical Engineering, confirming the great need within Asia of very high quality engineering graduates. Global engineering firms are keen to work in partnership with the Campus to achieve this.

While the first Southampton students arrived to study in September 2012, the official opening ceremony on 21 March 2013 gave the University an opportunity to commemorate its first overseas Campus with support from star Formula One graduate Adrian Newey as guest VIP. Newey earned a First Class honours degree from the University in 1980. He is now the Chief Technical Officer of the Infiniti Red Bull Racing Formula One team and has won more Formula One Constructors’ Championships than any other designer in the sport’s history. “It is my great pleasure to support the University of Southampton for the formal opening of its Malaysia Campus,” said Newey. “My degree from Southampton has certainly assisted me in my career and helped me develop, which I believe will also be true for Southampton’s future graduates in Malaysia and the UK."

Southampton’s Malaysia Campus portfolio has grown in recent months to include the first intake of students in Malaysia to study for the University’s world-class degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Over this period, high profile academics from ECS have joined a successful programme of guest lectures in Malaysia including web science pioneer Professor Dame Wendy Hall and noted cybersecurity expert Professor Mark Nixon.

The strength of the University’s current students has been recognised including the award of the scholarships by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation for the top students progressing on their course. This year will also see the first ‘James Dyson Foundation Engineering Scholarship’ Award to one student progressing to the third year who can best demonstrate his or her passion for engineering design. “We have been particularly impressed by the very high quality of the students studying with us in Malaysia who have to achieve the same A-level grades and equivalent qualifications to those students who join us in the UK,” said John McBride, Chief Executive of Southampton’s Malaysia Campus. “The students have taken the same assessments and exams on the same day as the rest of the cohort in Southampton and have performed very well.”

The students have enjoyed their education experience so far, and can now also enjoy state of the art sports facilities too. The construction of the 21.5-acre Stadium & Sports Complex with a seating capacity of 14,000 was completed last year and is now officially open catering to all the students and staff of EduCity@Iskandar. The facilities at the Stadium & Sports Complex include a sports stadium with a soccer-cum-rugby field and an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) standard 400-metre athletic track, an aquatic complex with an Olympic-sized swimming pool and diving pools which meet International Swimming Federation standards for water polo and synchronised swimming.

Southampton’s reputation as a research-focused university has also been underlined in Malaysia with the receipt of seven government-sponsored funding awards in recent months. The awards will support projects to be completed by academic colleagues and students in Malaysia and reflect areas of the University’s international expertise in microsystems and mechanical engineering.

“We’re particularly proud of our worldwide reputation for research which has been echoed in the unprecedented number of funding awards we’ve been granted in relatively short time in Malaysia,” said Professor Mark Spearing, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) . “This is truly remarkable given the very short time we’ve had to establish ourselves in the country but reflective of the quality and calibre of the academic staff we’ve attracted to join us in Malaysia and share our vision for world-changing research.

“As we look forward to the first students from the Malaysia Campus progressing to the UK for their third year in September 2014, we wish them an exciting and enjoyable year.”

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Published: 26 March 2014
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ECS students Dan Palmer and Elliot Hughes were among the prizewinners at this year’s National Hack the Government event held in London earlier this month.

Dan and Elliot, both final-year MEng Computer Science students, won the prize for their analysis of the quality of open data released by Government departments, a crucial factor in the building of successful apps which rely on Government information.

"We wrote our analysis over the weekend," said Dan, "and were able to show that a significant amount of the data being released by Government departments is not sufficiently accurate to be used in building apps.

"There were some significant failings, including links to files that weren’t there, and links to websites rather than data files," said Dan. "We realize that a couple of years ago the data didn’t exist or couldn’t be found, so it’s a positive development that the Government is promoting the provision of Open Data now. However, we wanted to show that much of the data released by the Government is of low quality and needs to be improved for it to be really useful."

National Hack the Government 2014 was organized by Rewired State. The annual event is aimed at improving transparency, open data and relationships between the Government and active hacking citizens.

Slides from Dan's and Elliot's talk are available here: https://speakerdeck.com/danpalmer/open-data-quality-dashboard-nhtg14

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Published: 27 March 2014
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A University of Southampton student is hoping to end the frustration that commuters experience waiting for trains by providing them with real-time rail updates through his mobile phone application, Realtime Trains.

Electronics and Computer Science student Tom Cairns has recently launched an app for the iPhone and iPad that provides users with real-time information on delays, departures and arrivals, as well as other details such as platform numbers, to make rail journeys run more smoothly.

Tom originally launched Realtime Trains as a website two years ago. The site now has around 350,000 real-time requests a day and over 100,000 individual UK users per month.

He had the idea for the service partially as a result of the lack of information available on his daily commute to university. Tom said: “I was quite frustrated with what existed and thought it could be done better. I wanted a real-time system that showed what was actually happening on the network at any time.”

Realtime Trains notifies users of when their train is approaching the station, arriving at the platform and boarding passengers. It also provides the platform information before it’s announced on the station boards.

Unlike others on the market, Tom’s app only uses open data from Network Rail. “The information I’m using effectively represents past events. I’ve had to develop algorithms to adapt this data so that I can build accurate predictions of the future,” said Tom.

Now in the final year of his Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science, Tom is planning to incorporate a journey planner in the near future and eventually expand the service into a one-stop shop for all public transport enquiries, including buses.

He said: “Public transport should be wide out in the open. Any information that can be made available can be formulated so that it becomes helpful to passengers. People should know where their train or bus is and what it will cost, or if it’s delayed and for how long.”

The Realtime Trains app is now available to buy from the iOS App Store or as an Android app from Google Play and the service is freely available at www.realtimetrains.co.uk.

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Published: 27 March 2014
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The University of Southampton is pleased to announce that Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science and a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, has been appointed as its first Regius Professor in Computer Science.

The prestigious title of Regius Professorship was awarded to the University, and 11 other institutions, by HM The Queen last year to mark her Diamond Jubilee. A Regius Professorship is a rare privilege – before the recent awards, only two had been created in the past century. They reflect the exceptionally high-quality of teaching and research at an institution; this is the only Regius Professorship in computer science.

Professor Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems. His research covers both the science and the engineering of these systems. Specifically, he has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, auctions, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation and decentralised control. He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing some of the first real-world systems (in domains such as business process management, energy systems/smart grid, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, and eDefence) and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering.

Professor Jennings also leads the ORCHID programme, which investigates how people can work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (agents) as ‘human agent collectives’ (HACs) to manage the response to a disaster.

Professor Jennings says: “It’s great to see such recognition for the department and the discipline of computing more generally. I am delighted and honoured to be the country’s first Regius Professor of Computer Science.”

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, says: “The award of a Regius Professorship is an honour for the University, the Faculty and Computer Science at Southampton. It represents years of hard work by a world-leading team of people. We are delighted that Professor Jennings is to be the first holder of the post. He is an exceptional scientist and will bring tremendous prestige to the role.”

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.

Southampton’s world-leading achievements in Computer Science include the development of pioneering hypermedia systems in the late 1980s, laying the foundations of agent-based computing and intelligent systems since the late 1990s and work on web science since 2000.

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Published: 1 April 2014
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Three academics from the University of Southampton have been recognised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as inspirational scientists and engineers.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering; Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group and Chairman and Co-Founder of the Open Data Institute; and Professor Sir David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre and Zepler Institute; were all named as RISE Renowned Fellows this week.

The RISE Renowned Fellows were chosen by an independent panel from nominees for the RISE awards who are Fellows of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Dame Wendy, Sir Nigel and Sir David will join 14 other RISE Renowned Fellows at a special dinner at the Cheltenham Science Festival, hosted by the incoming Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the EPSRC Professor Philip Nelson.

The EPSRC, in partnership with the Royal Academy of Engineering, launched the RISE campaign towards the end of last year to mark the 20th anniversary of the EPSRC. As well as the RISE Renowned Fellows they also announced 10 RISE Leaders for 2014. These RISE Leaders are recognised as innovators in engineering and physical sciences research who will help inspire and encourage others. They will be paired with individuals from government, business or media to communicate the importance and impact of their research, helping their partners become champions for science.

They will also nominate researchers who are ‘Rising Stars’ tipped to lead internationally excellent research in the future.

Chairman of the panel and current CEO of EPSRC Professor David Delpy said: “One of the best aspects of my job at EPSRC has been the chance to meet and speak directly to some of the most exciting, innovative and enthusiastic scientists and engineers in the UK. This campaign gives us the chance to recognise these outstanding individuals, but also to let others get to know them and the great research that they are doing.”

Philip Greenish, Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, commented: “The RISE awards are a unique opportunity to recognise established and future research leaders in engineering and physical sciences.

“RISE is part of the Engineering for Growth campaign which aims to bring engineering to the heart of society; celebrating the contribution of inspiring researchers to growth and innovation is a great way to help create a connection between engineering and daily life.”

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Published: 2 April 2014
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A delegation from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has just returned from a successful trip to Penang to raise awareness among the electronics industry of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) programme at the University of Southampton’s Malaysia Campus (USMC).

The University welcomed its first students onto the new MEng EEE degree last year and the team, led by Associate Dean Enterprise and Internationalisation Professor Peter Smith, wanted to engage with industry in Malaysia to explore the opportunities for their students and graduates.

The trip included meetings with a range of different companies from large, high-profile corporations including Motorola Solutions Inc., Intel and Finisar, as well as a number of small and medium enterprises.

“This was a very valuable trip as the Penang area is a significant player in the global electronics industry,” said Peter. “The companies we met with were highly receptive to the distinctive nature of the EEE programme we offer at USMC. They also recognised the highly employable nature of our graduates and were keen to work with us to establish opportunities for collaboration, internships and future job recruits. They were particularly interested in the emphasis we place on embedded systems and our teaching of integrated circuit design

“The opportunities for our graduates in Malaysia are significant and we wanted to ensure that we are developing the links required to make sure our students are well prepared to maximise these opportunities. It was also great to see many of our University of Southampton alumni already working in these companies,” he added.

Clement Packham, Senior Engineering Manager at Motorola commented: “Southampton University provides a refreshing change in the university scene by paying extra attention to student quality at intake. It is obvious that students there benefit from close supervision and enhanced coaching from their lecturers.”

USMC is based at EduCity@Iskandar, in South Johor, and offers University of Southampton courses taught by leading academics in Malaysia.

The four year 2+2 MEng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering will see the students spend the first two years studying in Malaysia before transferring to Southampton, UK, for the final two years. The programme has been approved by the Malaysian Qualifications Agency and accredited by the Institution of Engineering and Technology and combines ECS academics’ long experience in teaching excellent electrical engineering and electronic engineering programmes.

The EEE programme at USMC is identical to that offered at the Southampton campus, including the duplication of the outstanding ECS undergraduate laboratory facilities in Malaysia. As well as core EEE staff based at USMC, many academic staff from Southampton visit USMC to teach on the course.

To find out more about the EEE MEng degree visit www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/undergraduate/find_a_course or email malaysia@southampton.ac.uk

To find out more about our Malaysia Campus visit www.southampton.ac.uk/my

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Published: 2 April 2014
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A study led by scientists from the University of Southampton’s Nano Research Group experimentally demonstrates that metal-insulator-metal devices can concurrently function as memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors.

Published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the paper summarises that these components are concurrently modulated under voltage biasing and that meminductance is more apparent for devices of large active areas. Dr Themis Prodromakis and the team behind the study also demonstrated that the frequency response of the devices' pinched-hysteresis i-v does not follow the classical signature of memristors, and it is a manifestation of all three memory components. He believes that these features can be particularly useful in developing adaptive circuits that operate in radio-frequencies, while they open up the possibility of establishing self-resonating nanoscale components that could find applications in cellular neural networks and neuromorphic implementations.

The paper – entitled Memory Impedance in TiO2 based Metal-Insulator-Metal Devices – can be read at Nature’s Scientific Reports.

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Published: 8 April 2014
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Scientists at the University of Southampton are aiming to develop a handheld testing device to provide same day diagnosis from a patient’s bedside. In the fictional Star-Trek universe, the tricorder was used to remotely scan patients for a diagnosis. The new device could replace the current conventional diagnostic method, which is lengthy and is limited to single point measurements, due to the prohibitive costs and sample volumes required, preventing continuous monitoring of disease progression. The research, which is led by Dr Themis Prodromakis, will develop hybrid technology using electronic components as chemical sensors on printed circuit boards (PCBs). The device can carry out diagnosis on the same day and at the point-of-care – potentially avoiding the need to send protein samples away to laboratories for chemical assessment and diagnosis. Consequently, the new device could lead to public health benefits in reducing the time to treatment and reducing costs in both diagnosis and late-diagnosis treatments. Dr Themis Prodromakis, a Reader in Nanoelectronics and EPSRC Fellow at the University of Southampton, says: “A project of this nature is the perfect illustration of how academia, manufacturing and the end user can come together to pool their knowledge and experience to make a real and valuable change. There is a real opportunity for this new diagnostic tool to make a tangible difference to healthcare not only in the UK but in international markets as well.” The project is in collaboration with researchers in the Department of Infection and Immunity at Imperial College Healthcare NHS, who will carry out all clinical trials throughout this three-year project, and Newbury Electronics, a leading manufacturer of PCBs in the UK who will bring their extensive knowledge of manufacturing techniques and materials to this innovative work. Philip King, director at Newbury Electronics said: “We are delighted to have been appointed as the manufacturing partner for this project. Themis and his team have come up with an exciting alternative to more traditional diagnostic methods and it is now our job, as the expert manufacturers, to help transform this idea into a feasible product. The inclusion of Imperial College as the clinicians to demonstrate the relevance of this research ensures that valid input from all sides is incorporated right from the initial stages.” The research is being funded by a £1 million grant, awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Dr Prodromakis and his team are currently working with Newbury Electronics to gain a better understanding of the PCB manufacturing process and how this can be refined and amended to use alternative materials and to finer degrees of accuracy. If the development work goes to plan, the first prototypes should be available for initial testing by next year.

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Published: 9 April 2014
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Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi has been appointed as the new Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Southampton.

Professor Al-Hashimi, Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty, will succeed Professor Dame Wendy Hall as Dean on 1 August 2014. Dame Wendy will take on a leading role in the University’s new Web Science Institute to be formally launched in June, as well as the new Centre for Doctoral Training in Web Science Innovation, which was recently announced by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). “It is a great privilege to be appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering,” said Professor Al-Hashimi who previously served as Deputy Head of Education, Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton (2005-2008). “This is an exciting time to lead the Faculty, which I fully expect to contribute strongly towards achieving the University’s ambitious plans for distinction, globalisation and growth. “I look forward to building on the world-leading reputation of the Faculty in providing an environment that supports and rewards excellence in all its endeavours, inspiring both staff and students to achieve their full potential, and enabling all of its academic units and institutes to succeed and prosper,” he continued.

Congratulating Professor Al-Hashimi on his appointment, Vice-Chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam said: “I am delighted to confirm Bashir’s appointment as the new Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering. His outstanding track record in research, his clear commitment to education, and equally strong reputation in the electronics industry brings a formidable mix of experience to the post of Dean.

“I would also like to pay tribute to Dame Wendy for her leadership and contribution to the University’s success as a member of our Executive Group. She is one of the world’s trailblazers in Web Science and we look forward to her continued work in pushing out the boundaries in this field through the Web Science Institute and our Centre for Doctoral Training,” he continued.

The founder and director of the University’s Pervasive Systems Research Centre, Professor Al-Hashimi has a worldwide reputation for research into energy-efficient, reliable and testable digital hardware with a strong track record of innovation in system-level power management and power-constrained testing of systems-on-chip used in handheld devices. He is currently a member of the REF2014 panel Electrical, Electronic Engineering, Materials and Metrology.

Professor Al-Hashimi leads the £5.6 million EPSRC programme called PRiME – Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems. The project brings together four world-leading universities and five industrial partners, to address major research challenges in future high performance and low-energy embedded computing systems.

He also has a long association with the innovative microelectronics group ARM headquartered in Cambridge, which sponsors his professorial chair and for whom he is the co-director of the ARM-ECS (Electronics and Computer Science) research centre at the University of Southampton.

In 2013, Professor Al-Hashimi was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering joining the country’s most eminent and distinguished engineers. In January this year, Professor Al-Hashimi was awarded a highly prestigious Wolfson Research Merit Award by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of the British Computer Society – the Chartered Institute for IT - and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

In an industrial and academic career spanning 25 years, Professor Al-Hashimi has authored 300 publications, authored, co-authored and edited five research books in topics ranging from electronic circuits simulation to low-power test of integrated circuits, system-on-chip to energy-efficient embedded systems. He is very proud of the career development of his students (successfully supervising 32 PhD theses), many of whom now hold senior positions in industry and academia worldwide.

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Published: 30 April 2014
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A multidisciplinary team from the University of Southampton has won a national prize for their innovative research into the future of sociology in the digital age.

Dr Mark Weal, from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS); Professor Susan Halford, from Social Sciences; and Professor Catherine Pope, from Health Sciences, were awarded the SAGE prize for Innovation and Excellence in Sociology for their paper Digital Futures? Sociological Challenges and Opportunities in the Emergent Semantic Web that was published in the British Sociological Association’s (BSA) flagship journal Sociology.

The prize is awarded annually to the paper judged to be the most innovative and exceptional of all the papers published in the journal in the past year. It is one of four prizes awarded by the BSA for papers published in each of their prestigious journals – Cultural Sociology, Sociological Research Online, Sociology, and Work, Employment and Society.

Mark, Susan and Catherine’s paper stems from their innovative research into Web Science, a new discipline founded and pioneered by the University of Southampton.

It explores the future of sociology in the context of the digital age and is the first serious consideration of new kinds of digital data and ongoing transformations of the World Wide Web. In the paper they make the case that the emergent Semantic Web will have profound consequences for how research is thought about and done.

“We discussed the computer tools that are currently being developed to build a Semantic Web and the effects of this next generation Web on knowledge, data and expertise. We also looked at what the Semantic Web may offer sociological research and considered the implications of multidisciplinary engagement with the Web for the future of sociology,” said the team.

They were awarded £250 of SAGE books by Editor of Sociology Sarah Neal at the BSA’s annual conference in Leeds. There will also be a period of open access for their paper and SAGE will actively promote the paper over the coming year.

Mark said: “For me interdisciplinary research can often be the most challenging, but consequently the most rewarding. I have learnt so much through this collaboration and to have the paper recognised in this way is amazing.”

The trio initially worked together at the University’s £6m Research Councils UK Web Science Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) that brought together researchers and educators from across the University to pioneer Web Science masters education and research. Catherine was Deputy Director of the DTC from 2009-2012, Mark was the first UK lecturer in Web Science, and Susan is Co-Director of the new Web Science Institute at Southampton that is due to be officially launched in the summer.

“The paper grew out of our often intense conversations about the impact of the Web on society and the impact of people and technologies on the Web,” said Catherine.

“Working together on this paper has been one of the most intellectually exciting and challenging times of our careers. Multidisciplinary working is vital to Web Science. One discipline alone cannot help us understand this complex and rapidly changing technology and how it interacts with society,” said Mark.

The team is already collaborating with colleagues at the University and with external partners to develop some of the research ideas proposed in the paper.

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