The University of Southampton

Published: 11 October 2019
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Dr Basel Halak (l) and Dr Mohammed El-Hajjar (r) are based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Transceivers for beyond-5G wireless and reliable tracking for electronics will be developed through two new Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Industrial Fellowships at the University of Southampton.

Dr Mohammed El-Hajjar and Dr Basel Halak from the School of Electronics and Computer Science will spearhead collaborative research projects with industry partners InterDigital and Arm through the prestigious scheme. The academics are amongst 19 UK-based researchers selected by the RAEng this autumn to realise innovative new technologies.

Awardees will gain first-hand experience of working in an industrial environment and familiarise themselves with current industry practices, helping them to improve the industrial relevance of their academic research and teaching.

Mohammed’s research will build upon several years of collaboration with InterDigital to advance the research and design of transceivers for 6G systems.

“Wireless communications have played a key role in creating the world as we know it,” he explains. “With mobile subscribers continuing to demonstrate an insatiable demand for data and billions of smart wireless devices predicted in future services for smart homes, cities, transport, healthcare and environments, the explosive demand for wireless access will soon surpass the data transfer capacity of existing mobile systems. “Achieving the vision of the Internet of Things relies on a huge number of smart devices or machines acting in different roles. A major challenge for allowing these devices to be connected is the design trade-off of the underlying cost, complexity and performance requirements of communications.

“Working closely with InterDigital, I will design and develop novel signal processing techniques relying on the concept of Holographic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) for allowing low-cost high-performance communications supporting a large number of devices.”

Basel will partner with the security experts in Arm to build a detailed threat model of the integrated circuit (IC) supply chain.

“The multinational-distributed nature of IC supply chain has made it vulnerable to hardware security attacks such as Trojan Insertion and IC counterfeit,” he says. “These have severe financial consequences, for example, counterfeiting is costing the UK economy around £30bn and is putting around 14,800 jobs at risk.

“This project aims to create an infrastructure to enforce reliable tracking of electronic systems throughout its life cycle to mitigate against said attacks. This will be achieved by designing an unforgeable hardware root of trust that can be embedded in each computing device and developing appropriate defence mechanisms based on a trustworthy cryptographically secure tracking system.”

Basel has vast experience of the implementation flow of IC, from concept to silicon, and has recently published a book in this area on the use of Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) to produce trustworthy electronic systems. He has also designed a new module on secure hardware design to further promote this research area.

The RAEng Industrial Fellowships scheme has supported 58 researchers to complete placements with 53 industrial partners over the past five years.

Other engineering disciplines covered in this latest cohort include innovations in plastic waste recycling, carbon dioxide capture, bamboo-timber composite beams for buildings and 3D reconstructed human skin.

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Published: 7 October 2019
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Over 100 people took part in Hack the South 2019.

Student hackers from the University of Southampton have been named the winners of the Major League Hacking (MLH) Europe Hackathon Season.

The University topped a leader board of over 150 European institutions in its debut entry to the series thanks to its high-achieving, 36-hour Hack the South competition.

Hackathons challenge small teams to work intensely over a weekend on a new website, app or device that is then presented for feedback and prizes.

The MLH Europe Hackathon Season, which ran from August 2018 to July 2019, included over 5,000 hackers creating more than 1,000 projects in 32 events across the continent.

Universities earn points toward their final ranking through a combination of merit points awarded for winning builds and participation points received from entering hackathon events.

Alexandru Rosianu, 2018-19 HackaSoton President, says, “Southampton is a great place for hacking. Since I joined in 2016, every year I saw tons of enthusiastic students learning new technologies and building crazy ideas. It’s a great place to be, especially with the Future Worlds accelerator ready to take hackathon-winners to the next level.

“I had always considered Hack the South a massive success, but it is an amazing surprise to be named the best MLH hackathon in Europe. I'd like to highlight the team's dedication — we all had coursework and third year projects, but we really, really wanted to make it happen.”

Over 150 people participated in Hack the South 2019, with the bumper turnout requiring an entire truck of food, snacks and drinks to be delivered to fuel the hungry participants. The event, which was co-organised by HackaSoton and the Fish on Toast entrepreneurship and business society, included over £2,000 in prizes for the judges’ pick of the top three teams.

“HackaSoton is focused on teaching tech and entrepreneurship skills through tech events,” Alexandru says. “Hack the South 2019 was my 13th hackathon and I still enjoy the thrills of working (almost) non-stop for a weekend to show a presentable product at the end. The group is looking for new committee members to build on this year’s success and everyone is welcome.”

English universities dominated the top 10 places of the Official 2019 Europe MLH Hackathon Season, with King’s College London and Coventry University maintaining their second and third finishes respectively. The University of Cambridge rose four places to 10th, while the University of Surrey climbed 39 places to 8th. The complete season’s standings are available on the MLH website.

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Worrawichaipat, Phuriwat, Gerding, Enrico, Kaparias, Ioannis and Ramchurn, Sarvapali (2021) Resilient intersection management with multi-vehicle collision avoidance. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 3, [670454]. (doi:10.3389/frsc.2021.670454).

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Huang, Ruomeng, Dai, Peng, De Groot, Kees, Muskens, Otto and Duan, Huigao (2021) Dataset for Accurate Inverse Design of Fabry–Pérot-Cavity-Based Color Filters far beyond sRGB via a Bidirectional Artificial Neural Network. University of Southampton doi:10.5258/SOTON/D1686 [Dataset]

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Dai, Peng, Sun, Kai, Yan, Xingzhao, Muskens, Otto, De Groot, Kees, Zhu, Xupeng, Hu, Yueqiang, Duan, Huigao and Huang, Ruomeng (2022) Inverse design of structural color: Finding multiple solutions via conditional generative adversarial networks. Nanophotonics, 11 (13), 3057-3069. (doi:10.1515/nanoph-2022-0095).

Dai, Peng, Sun, Kai, Yan, Xingzhao, Muskens, Otto, De Groot, Kees, Zhu, Xupeng, Hu, Yueqiang, Duan, Huigao and Huang, Ruomeng (2022) Dataset for "Inverse Design of Structural Color: Finding Multiple Solutions via Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks". University of Southampton doi:10.5258/SOTON/D2182 [Dataset]

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