BluPoint a spin-out company from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has been awarded £0.5m to launch its "pop-up" local-web technology. The award has been made under the ICURe Innovation-to-Commercialisation programme, piloted by the SETsquared Partnership and funded by HEFCE and InnovateUK, the UK’s innovation agency.

BluPoint has created a solar-powered networking system that allows communities to share digital content on their mobile phones. It's free to end users and they don't need a smartphone – the technology can even work without internet connectivity or a web browser. And what's more it's fast – since it creates a localised web, it can serve content up at speeds faster than 4G.

Dr Mike Santer, Founder and Director of BluPoint explained: "There are over seven billion connected mobile phones on the planet which is roughly the same number of people, so mobile phones are pretty much ubiquitous now. Our solution can use Wi-Fi, bluetooth and even FM radio to enable people to consume and create information on our network so anybody with a mobile device will get value from BluPoint."

Innovate UK is a government-sponsored initiative to fund, support and connect innovative businesses to accelerate sustainable economic growth. BluPoint provides a much needed solution for companies, governments and other key organisations in less economically developed countries without an internet infrastructure to communicate with people in offline and off grid locations. The company's vision is to "improve the lives of 20 million people in 20,000 communities by 2020".

As Peter Dingley, Director of BluPoint explained: "We want to have a social impact with this and what we do. Imagine putting a new infrastructure into a place that never had the web or an intranet. It enables a lot of innovation and offers local business a series of opportunities to emerge."

The inspiration for BluPoint came from Mike's PhD that he undertook at Southampton, for which he researched the adoption of mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa. He found that in low-resource off-grid rural communities it was common for people to spend between 40 and 70 per cent of their money on their mobile device every month. And this led to people taking desperate measures to get internet access.

Horrified by this link, Mike responded by striving to give people access to information that was entirely free at the point of use. The University supported his efforts, which allowed him access to key people and resources.

Mike said: "Southampton University and its associated Science Park are intrinsically linked with our journey. The funding we have just received would not be possible without the University as we were a spin out innovation into a business."

The funding will allow the company to get up and running and to bridge the gap between the commercial idea, and raising external funding to roll it out on a global basis. Their next step is to partner with a few companies on pilot projects to quantify the social impact of BluPoint. With potential applications in health, education and mining organisations communication just to name a few, the possibilities are far-reaching.

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton are at the forefront of a new science that is finding ways in which computers can work intelligently in partnership with people. This could support the management of some of today's most challenging situations, such as the aftermath of major disasters and smart energy systems.

The five-year ORCHID project has looked at how we work with computers: instead of issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with agents, highly interconnected computational components that are able to act autonomously and intelligently, forming human-agent collectives (HACs).

Agents can be in sensors collecting and analysing information to give the ‘bigger picture’ of an emergency situation as it develops or in a smart meter monitoring the energy consumption of your home, recommending how you might adapt your usual routine to reduce both the cost of the energy that you consume and its carbon content.

On 22 September at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, there will be a showcase of world-leading ORCHID research from the fields of energy systems, citizen science and disaster response. The event will feature keynote talks from project leaders, presentations of case studies and demonstrations of technologies such as:

• Joulo - a home heating advice system that uses a low-cost temperature logger and online algorithms to provide feedback to households on how they are using their current heating system, along with autonomous intelligent home heating agents that can learn the householders’ comfort preferences in order to provide efficient comfortable heat control.
• AtomicORCHID - a mobile mixed-reality game in which first responders work together with a response headquarters to rescue as many casualties as possible. This game has allowed researchers to study team coordination and understand how human responders can be supported by computational agents that assist the planning and execution of the rescue mission, including the coordination of multi-UAV deployments.
• Japan Nuclear Crowd Map platform - Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, citizen scientists deployed sensors and uploaded data to help track the spread of airborne radioactive particles. To identify accurate information from some many sources, the platform combines reports from thousands of sensors and uses machine learning algorithms to correct for biases and noise and weed out those sensors that are defective.

The £10m EPSRC-funded project has brought together around 60 researchers from the universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, Secure Meters UK Ltd, Rescue Global and the Australian Centre of Field Robotics. It is led by Professor Nick Jennings, who leads the University of Southampton’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group – the largest research group of its kind in the world.

Professor Jennings says: “This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future.

“This shift is needed to cope with the volume, variety and pace of the information and services that are available. It is simply unfeasible to expect individuals to be aware of the full range of potentially relevant possibilities and to be able to pull them together manually. Computers need to step up to the plate and proactively guide users’ interactions based on their preferences and constraints. In so doing, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines.”

More about ORCHID: ORCHID has brought together researchers from around the world and made fundamental scientific breakthroughs and shown how these can be used to build practical applications that have been tested ‘in the wild’. The project has employed and trained 50 research fellows and PhD students. It has generated over 200 publications, of which 40 are collaborations between the partners and half involve an international co-author. The ORCHID legacy includes the development of 25 new academic collaborations and follow-on grants worth £15m. ORCHID researchers have organised 25 major conferences and workshops and won over 20 prizes, awards and best papers.

ORCHID has engaged with a variety of audiences, generating media coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, New Scientist, WIRED, the Economist and the Emergency Times. Its work has been demonstrated and presented at public events such as the British Science Festival, ‘I’m a scientist’, BBC Summer of Wildlife and Farnborough Air Show. ORCHID has also provided masterclasses for organisations including Toyota, British Gas Connected Homes, British Council on Disaster Response and South East Regional Cyber Crime Unit.

A number of technologies have been pulled through by industry, via engagement with over 40 organisations. ORCHID research has generated six patents in areas such as crowd-sourcing, sensor data processing and machine learning, and has released software for problems as diverse as non-intrusive load monitoring, tracking provenance and mobility analysis.

Academics in Electronics and Computer Science, and Southampton Education School, at the University of Southampton have been praised by government minister Nick Gibb for their contribution to the success of the UK’s Network of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science, through the establishment of a Computing at School Regional Centre for the South of England (CRC South).

Professor Les Carr and Robert Blair from the Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training and Dr Janice Griffiths, Director of the University’s Mathematics and Science Learning Centre, were specifically highlighted by Nick Gibb, Minister of State for Schools, for their participation in the Network which aims to build communities of computing teachers to support each other and improve their subject knowledge.

Mr Gibb expressed his sincere thanks to the University and praised Southampton alongside the other universities participating in the Network which, he said, “have exceptional computer science school outreach initiatives in place and provide outstanding support to teachers in their region”.

“Thanks to your staff and those from the other universities involved we will be able to make sure school teachers throughout the country have access to the support they need to become excellent teachers of computer science,” Mr Gibb concluded.

Now in its third year, the Network, run by the Computing at School group (CAS), has so far helped over 40,000 teachers gain in expertise and confidence. The ten CRCs will provide strong regional strategic leadership to ensure the Network continues to provide high quality professional development at scale. Southampton brings expertise in computing through Electronics and Computer Science and in teacher education and professional development through the Mathematics and Science Learning Centre.

In September last year, the Government introduced a new statutory computing curriculum for all state maintained primary and secondary schools with the aim of establishing computing as a core subject discipline in schools on a par with the natural sciences. The success of this new curriculum depends on school teachers, head teachers and school governors who, although enthusiastic about the new curriculum, mostly have no background in computer science.

Professor Carr, co-director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, has worked with CAS for several years supporting teachers who are responsible for delivering the new curriculum and its emphasis on programming, communications and creating computational systems. He has run annual conferences at the university for 200 teachers from around the south coast and with the support of the Education School's Maths and Science Learning Centre has provided regular CPD activities to teachers in preparation for the new curriculum.

Professor Carr praised the efforts of his colleagues from Southampton Education School, particularly Dr John Woollard who helped create the new Computing curriculum and is a leading light in the Computing at School group which runs the Network.

“Our work is another success story for Southampton's excellent interdisciplinary reputation,” Professor Carr enthused. “I am very proud to be part of an influential and multidisciplinary team, displaying the university's excellence in Computing, Communications and Education and achieving significant impact in training up new UK capability for the Digital Economy.

“This year, with funding from CAS, we are partnering with the Faculty of Social, Human and Mathematical Sciences’ Institute of Professional Practice in Education through Dr Griffiths to provide leadership and to co-ordinate support to the region's teachers and strengthen their professional network,” Professor Carr concluded.

The University of Southampton has been awarded a multi-million grant from Lloyd’s Register Foundation to bring together some of the world’s brightest early career researchers to find new ways of using nanotechnologies to improve safety at sea, on land and in the air.

Dr Themis Prodromakis, from the Nanoelectronics and Nanotechnology Group within Electronics and Computer Science, is leading the £3m programme, which will receive match funding from partner organisations. He says: “Researchers are always looking for funding for high risk, high reward ideas. They want to collaborate with the best scientists and engineers in the world and gain access to state-of-art facilities. The Lloyd’s Register Foundation International COnsortium in Nanotechnologies (ICON) will assemble the world’s leading universities, research institutions and innovative companies to help them tackle many of today’s most challenging issues by recruiting talented PhD students from every continent.”

Applications will soon be invited from scientists and engineers keen to pioneer research across a range of industries. Nanotechnologies are already widely used, for example in smart phones, cameras and gadgets. Breakthroughs already being developed include cars, boats and planes built from lightweight materials stronger than steel with new functions such as self-cleaning and repairing; flexible textiles that can become rigid and shockproof to protect the wearer; sensors in hostile environments such as the deep ocean and space; tiny implants for real-time monitoring to aid diagnoses for doctors; and smart devices that harvest energy from their environment.

ICON will support more than 50 PhD students to undertake research at leading global universities, aided by matched funding. They will work together with partners from industry on interdisciplinary projects and access world-leading facilities, such as the £120m Southampton Nanofabrication Centre. The doctoral researchers will meet every year to present their findings and share ideas and concepts, becoming part of a global doctoral cohort addressing the Foundation’s safety mission.

Professor Richard Clegg, Managing Director of Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “We are pleased to support the University of Southampton in developing this global cohort of scientists. Their research will develop applications to further the Foundation’s safety goals whilst also providing training and building technical capacity in support of our educational mission. The doctoral students joining this consortium will gain an understanding of how their research can benefit society whilst developing international research networks at an early stage in their careers.”

“The support of Lloyd’s Register Foundation is key to our mission,” adds Dr Prodromakis. “Lloyd’s Register itself is well-known for promoting safety worldwide for more than 250 years. Its Global Technology Centre is now based in Southampton and its Foundation has become a catalyst to support research, training and education for the benefit of society. We are delighted to work alongside them.”

The first group of new startup businesses to be funded from Europe’s Open Data Incubator, ODINE, range from an innovative app that helps track infectious diseases to a global search engine for the Internet of Things.

Seven startups were funded in the first open call from the European incubator programme, receiving €650,000 in total.

The startup companies, based across Europe, all use open data in innovative ways. Their participation in ODINE will enable them to develop successful sustainable businesses through a wide-ranging support package and accelerator programme, including peer-networking, expert advisories and coaching, innovation labs, VC investors, data owners, and the media. ‘The response to this first funding call has been very exciting,’ said Dr Elena Simperl, associate-professor within the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and leader of the ODINE Programme. ‘We were impressed by the wide-ranging innovation and the range of applications which covered the use of open data in business sectors such as finance, bio-materials, and commercial property.

‘Other businesses to be funded in this round will directly impact on people’s daily lives – such as the infectious disease tracker, and a new platform for the urban cyclist community.’

ODINE represents a new European startup incubator for SMEs and startups which use open data to create economic and social value. The programme is funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, and includes seven partner organizations, including the Open Data Institute (ODI), the University of Southampton, Telefónica, The Guardian, Fraunhofer, and the Open Knowledge Foundation (Germany).

Throughout the programme, which runs until August 2016, new startups will be recruited every two months on a rolling basis and winning companies are eligible for grants of up to €100,000. The next application deadline for the startup programme is 11 September (apply here).

‘We know that open data has the potential to radically change the way organisations value and use data,’ said Dr Simperl. 'ODINE will offer mentoring, technology and financial support to SME innovators in this space. SMEs are really significant for the European economy and we are giving them the chance to experiment with open data and to exploit business ideas that use open datasets to create added value.’

ODINE has places for 50-70 startup businesses over the next two years. Selected projects will run for up to six months, and new proposals will be assessed on a two-monthly cycle by a panel of external reviewers. Applications take the form of a written submission and will be assessed in three areas: idea, impact, and team and budget.

Meet the ODINE team at the Open Data Institute Summit, 3 November 2015 – London http://summit.theodi.org/

The first round of winners are:

UK

• Sickly - a company which gathers detailed open data on the spread of infectious illnesses amongst children, thanks to its free app with which parents can securely report their child’s illness to his/her school. Sickly’s aim is to track infectious illnesses with this anonymised data, and support public health organisations in the fight against disease. (www.sickly.org)

• Thingful - a global search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), Thingful indexes dozens of public open data assets and millions of connected devices from temperature sensors, to air quality monitors, to sharks. Thingful is developing a data mediation service for IoT to discover and transact in device data based on access entitlements using a decentralised and trustless system. Thingful is also a member of the ODI Startup Programme. (www.thingful.net)

• Pikhaya Smart Streets - this service offers market intelligence to help entrepreneurs and local councils assess the business potential in empty commercial properties in deprived urban centres. It aggregates open data on local consumer purchasing behaviour and pedestrian footfall, as well as existing local business rent and salary expenditure. (http://pikhaya.com/)

France • CommoPrices - a web portal of business intelligence which publishes over 1600 commodity prices. Based on open data from French Customs, data is structured, selected and processed to generate benchmark price references. (https://commoprices.com/)

Italy • InSymbio - a business-to-business e-marketplace which aims to make one company’s bio-based residues and waste, another company’s raw material. (https://www.insymbio.com)

Austria • BikeCitizens - this company offers a platform to the urban cyclist community. The free Bike Citizens App is available for more than 200 cities in the UK and Europe, and uses OpenStreetMap to offer offline navigation, route planning and tracking. (www.bikecitizens.net)

Estonia • Instats.co - a web service helping knowledge workers who need to find and visualize massive datasets to easily create insightful presentations (www.instats.co)

ODINE has places for 50-70 startup businesses over the next two years. Interested startups should register via http://opendataincubator.eu/. Applicants submit a short proposal presenting their idea and the budget required. The applicant must be registered with the European Commission as an SME at the time of submission.

For further information contact Dr Elena Simperl: e.simperl@soton.ac.uk; Joyce Lewis: j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk

With an ever increasing number of everyday objects from our homes, workplaces and even from our wardrobes, getting connected to the Internet - examples of the ‘Internet of Things (IoT) - researchers from the University of Southampton have identified easy-to-use techniques to configure IoT objects, to make them more secure and hence help protect them from online attacks.

This increased connectivity brings additional risk. Setting personalised and strong passwords when connecting new devices to the Internet, for example through our home Wi-Fi networks, can mitigate such risks. However, many IoT devices have limited interfaces: just a few buttons (if any at all) and light indicators, making it challenging for users to configure them. If secure configuration becomes complicated, users may choose easier, less secure options that leave their devices vulnerable.

Southampton researchers compared four interaction techniques for the configuration of IoT devices, looking for methods that allowed security, but were quick and easy to use. All four techniques used the smartphone touchscreen to let users enter secure passwords.

Two of the techniques used a more ‘traditional’ approach by connecting the smartphone and the IoT device through a USB or audio cable, via the smartphone’s headphone socket. The third technique used a ‘Wi-Fi-only approach, where the smartphone creates a special temporary Wi-Fi network, or ‘ad-hoc network’, to which the IoT device automatically connects before being redirected to the correct permanent network. The final option was the smartphone and the IoT device exchanging information through light: the smartphone's screen flashed black and white to mean binary 'zero' or 'one'; the IoT device read this light/binary pattern to learn the password from the smartphone. The results, which are presented at the ACM Ubicomp 2015 conference in Japan this week, found that two of the techniques were noticeably more usable than the others - the audio cable and the Wi-Fi-only interactions.

Study co-author Dr Enrico Costanza, from the Agents, Interaction, Complexity Group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, says: “IoT objects can be attacked and possibly hijacked, putting our privacy, data and safety in question. We believe that our results can help designers and researchers make IoT devices, and especially their configuration, more usable and therefore secure. Moreover, we believe that not enough attention has been placed on how to make the IoT easy to use and to configure, so we hope that our results will motivate others in researching this topic.”

Further information

This work was supported in part by the EPSRC C-tECh (EP/K002589/1) and CharIoT (EP/L02392X/1) projects. A copy of the research paper ‘Connecting the Things to the Internet: An Evaluation of Four Configuration Strategies for Wi-Fi Devices with Minimal User Interfaces’ by Jewell, Michael O., Costanza, Enrico and Kittley-Davies, Jacob (2015) is available at: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/379702/

Watch a video about the project at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go10n6s39mg

Professor mc schraefel writes for The Conversation about Facebook’s new intelligent assistant, M, and how such services could be shrinking our online options.

The “digital assistant” is proliferating, able to combine intelligent natural language processing, voice-operated control over a smartphone’s functions and access to web services. It can set calendar appointments, launch apps, and run requests. But if that sounds very clever – a computerised talking assistant, like HAL9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s mostly just running search engine queries and processing the results.

Facebook has now joined Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon with the launch of its digital assistant M, part of its Messaging smartphone app. Its special sauce is that M is powered not just by algorithms but by data serfs: human Facebook employees who are there to ensure that every request that it cannot parse is still fulfilled, and in doing so training M by example. That training works because every interaction with M is recorded – that’s the point, according to David Marcus, Facebook’s vice-president of messaging: We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do. Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time.

Facebook, through M, will capture and facilitate that “intent to buy” and take its cut directly from the subsequent purchase rather than as an ad middleman. It does this by leveraging messaging, which was turned into a separate app of its own so that Facebook could integrate PayPal-style peer-to-peer payments between users. This means Facebook has a log not only of your conversations but also your financial dealings. In an interview with Fortune magazine at the time, Facebook product manager, Steve Davies, said: People talk about money all the time in Messenger but end up going somewhere else to do the transaction. With this, people can finish the conversation the same place started it.

In a somewhat creepy way, by reading your chats and knowing that you’re “talking about money all the time” – what you’re talking about buying – Facebook can build up a pretty compelling profile of interests and potential purchases. If M can capture our intent it will not be by tracking what sites we visit and targeting relevant ads, as per advert brokers such as Google and Doubleclick. Nor by targeting ads based on the links we share, as Twitter does. Instead it simply reads our messages.

Talking about money, money talks

M is built to carry out tasks such as booking flights or restaurants or making purchases from online stores, and rather than forcing the user to leave the app in order to visit a web store to complete a purchase, M will bring the store – more specifically, the transaction – to the app.

Suddenly the 64% of smartphone purchases that happen at websites and mobile transactions outside of Facebook, are brought into Facebook. With the opportunity to make suggestions through eavesdropping on conversations, in the not too distant future our talking intelligent assistant might say: I’m sorry Dave, I heard you talking about buying this camera. I wouldn’t do if I were you Dave: I found a much better deal elsewhere. And I know you’ve been talking about having that tattoo removed. I can recommend someone – she has an offer on right now, and three of your friends have recommended her service. Shall I book you in?

Buying a book from a known supplier may be a low risk purchase, but other services require more discernment. What kind of research about cosmetic surgery has M investigated? Did those three friends use that service, or were they paid to recommend it? Perhaps you’d rather know the follow-up statistics than have a friend’s recommendation.

Still, because of its current position as the dominant social network, Facebook knows more about us, by name, history, social circle, political interests, than any other single internet service. And it’s for this reason that Facebook wants to ensure M is more accurate and versatile than the competition, and why it’s using humans to help the AI interpret interactions and learn. The better digital assistants like M appear to us, the more trust we have in them. Simple tasks performed well builds a willingness to use that service elsewhere – say, recommending financial services, or that cosmetic treatment, which stand to offer Facebook a cut of much more costly purchase.

No such thing as a free lunch

So for Facebook, that’s more users spending more of their time using its services and generating more cash. Where’s the benefit for us?

We’ve been trained to see such services as “free”, but as the saying goes, if you don’t pay for it, then it’s you that’s the product. We’ve seen repeatedly in our Meaningful Consent Project that it’s difficult to evaluate the cost to us when we don’t know what happens to our data.

People were once nervous about how much the state knew of them, with whom they associated and what they do, for fear that if their interests and actions were not aligned with those of the state they might find ourselves detained, disappeared, or disenfranchised. Yet we give exactly this information to corporations without hesitation, because we find ourselves amplified in the exchange: that for each book, film, record or hotel we like there are others who “like” it too.

The web holds a mirror up to us, reflecting back our precise interests and behaviour. Take search, for instance. In the physical world of libraries or bookshops we glance through materials from other topics and different ideas as we hunt down our own query. Indeed we are at our creative best when we absorb the rich variety in our peripheral vision. But online, a search engine shows us only things narrowly related to what we seek. Even the edges of a web page will be filled with targeted ads related to something known to interest us. This narrowing self-reflection has grown ubiquitous online: on social networks we see ourselves relative to our self-selected peers or idols. We create reflections.

The workings of Google, Doubleclick or Facebook reveal these to be two-way mirrors: we are observed through the mirror but see only our reflection, with no way to see the machines observing us. This “free” model is so seductive – it’s all about us – yet it leads us to become absorbed in our phones-as-mirrors rather than the harder challenge of engaging with the world and those around us.

It’s said not to look too closely at how a sausage is made for fear it may put you off. If we saw behind the mirror, would we be put off by the internet? At least most menus carry the choice of more than one dish; the rise of services like M suggests that, despite the apparent wonder of less effortful interactions, the internet menu we’re offered is shrinking.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

mc schraefel is Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance within Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

The 19th International Symposium On High Voltage Engineering (ISH) was held successfully in Pilsen, Czech Republic from August 23 to 28, 2015. ISH is a comprehensive electrical conference, with topics including Electromagnetic fields, High voltage testing techniques and advanced materials. The conference attracted almost 580 attendees from 39 countries. ISH has a reputation for encouraging the presentation of latest scientific results from young researchers. Professor George Chen, Ziyun Li and Bo Huang attended ISH on behalf of the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory (TDHVL) and gave oral presentations. Bo Huang, a first year PHD student in TDHVL, presented a paper on ‘Space charge characteristics and the electric field distortion after polarity reversal operation in two layers of oil-impregnated paper and oil’ which was very well received. His paper was subsequently recognised as one of the top 20 papers presented and he was awarded the “Young Researcher Award” for achievements in his research to date. “I will keep working hard and I am proud to be a part of TDHVL” said Bo Huang. “This is further confirmation that the research we are undertaking in paper/oil insulation systems is world leading” said Prof Paul Lewin, Director of the TDHVL.

A team of life sciences researchers at the University of Southampton have been awarded a £1.5m Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant to develop cutting-edge data analysis techniques that could help transform future medical research.

The interdisciplinary team, led by Professor of Mathematics Jacek Brodzki and including researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), is at the forefront of developing new techniques to interpret large complex datasets that could be used in the development of new drugs, and improve the detection, diagnosis and treatment of healthcare conditions such as asthma. The programme will bring together researchers from mathematics, statistics, computer science, chemistry and medicine under the aegis of the Institute for Life Sciences (IfLS) to explore the significant societal challenge of extracting contextual information from the enormous amount of data.

Jacek said: “The relentless growth of the variety, and availability of data has profoundly transformed all aspects of human life, but this Big Data revolution has left us facing a paradox – while we create and collect more data than ever before, it is often difficult to unlock the information it contains. In order to convert the vast amounts of data into understandable, actionable information we need to create analytic tools that are equal to the challenge, and we believe that by developing a powerful fusion of machine learning, statistics, and topology we will create a seamless pathway from data analysis to implementation.”

The programme will see the team developing their work to address the problem of creating a set of descriptors to diagnose and treat asthma, as well as investigating a more efficient search of new compounds in chemistry that play a key part in the creation of new medicines.

The team will be working with an extensive network of scientific and business connections, including the multinational EU consortium U-BIOPRED (the largest asthma research programme in the world), to test their new analytic tools on real-world problems such as asthma. By using quality controlled patient data collected by U-BIOPRED they will identify leading biomarkers of asthma that could potentially lead to new diagnostic pathways and better personalised healthcare provision for asthma sufferers. Researchers will also explore the structure of bronchial trees to help improve understanding of the efficiency of different asthma treatments.

“Obviously, I am delighted we won this grant,” said Professor Mahesan Niranjan, a co-investigator in the proposal and Deputy Head of Department of ECS. “As in many similar grants funded at ECS, this success is testimony to the ease with which we are able to work across traditional discipline boundaries, identifying and solving challenging data analysis problems.

“A particular appeal to me is the collaboration with the School of Mathematics. When you want to go beyond simply applying off-the shelf machine learning tools to data in a problem domain and develop deep insights into the behaviour of computational models, or be able to make formal statements about their limitations, where else would you look other than Mathematics – the Queen of all Sciences?”

Jacek added: “This funding is affirmation that we have created a truly interdisciplinary research partnership where all disciplines can meaningfully interact and work together on common ground. The EPSRC award gives us the means to be able to pursue the next step in our vision and to test our ideas against some of the most challenging problems in medicine and the sciences.”

Professor Peter J S Smith, Director of the Institute for Life Sciences said “I am delighted to see the breadth of interdisciplinary research come together in such a successful venture. This is an exciting project, for both the research group and the wider University”.

Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has been welcoming its first cohort of students from our University of Southampton Malaysia Campus (USMC) for the start of the new academic year.

The students, who have completed the first two years of their four-year MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) in Malaysia, have arrived in Southampton to start their third year. The degree is part of the University’s Integrated International Engineering Education (IIEE) programme which allows students to spend two years studying in Malaysia followed by two years studying in the UK.

"This marks a significant milestone in the development of our USMC/ECS EEE Degree programme" said Professor Paul Lewin, Deputy Head of Department (Education). “Over the past two years, more than a dozen staff from ECS have spent periods of time in Malaysia delivering course material to ensure that the educational experience for the USMC students is the same as for those based in Southampton. This has had the added benefit that on arrival in the UK, the USMC students already personally know their project supervisors, tutors and many of the staff that will be teaching them.”

Since arriving in the UK and Southampton, students have been familiarising themselves with their new surroundings and teaching laboratories. As part of the welcome programme the students were given a tour of some of the specialist research facilities within the Department, including the clean rooms and the high voltage laboratory, before meeting the Department's management team and Faculty's Student Office staff for tea and cakes, hosted by Professor Nick Jennings, Head of Department. "I am very pleased to welcome our first USMC students to Southampton", said Nick, "I am sure that they come very well prepared for the challenges ahead and believe they will perform at a high level over the final two years of our EEE degree".

Wen Yee Tey, one of the group of students arriving from Malaysia said: “I have been enjoying my time at the University so far. Lecturers and staff from the ECS department have made me feel very welcome as they give sufficient support and assistance to international students like me. Being one of the ECS students, I get to use the newly-upgraded computer lab and practical lab in which computers with big screens and high performance are provided. I also have a chance to get to know lots of people with different backgrounds because a wide range of activities are provided for students. Southampton really is a lovely place where wonderful people from all over the world are gathered.”