Entrepreneurs from the University of Southampton have launched an intelligent gift recommendation service to inspire creative and joyful gift giving this Christmas.

Electronic Engineering graduates Dylan Grey and Mike Oakley have created BOON, a free website that uses state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and personality deduction techniques to generate tailored gift inspiration.

BOON selects gift ideas specific to users and their recipients based on responses to several questions and an online catalogue from over 100 retailers.

Co-founder Dylan explains: “We’re on a mission to help people re-discover the joy of giving this Christmas by taking the pain out of finding the perfect gift for a loved one. BOON provides inspiration unique to your needs in a matter of minutes, so you no longer have to trawl through countless gift sites getting overwhelmed with all the options.â€?

Dylan and Mike graduated from the School of Electronics and Computer Science this summer and have based their business in the University’s new Future Worlds Accelerator on Highfield Campus.

“When I entered my final year, I thought a lot about what I wanted to do after graduation. I decided to start my own company, but it was only after talking to Resident Mentor Ben Clark in Future Worlds that I realised I shouldn’t wait until after graduating,â€? Dylan says.

“Degrees are a lot of work but I was really excited about the business and devoted as much time as I could to it. And I’m pleased I did; if I hadn’t started working on BOON during my degree, I wouldn’t have got all the amazing support from Future Worlds that has been so beneficial to get the company to the stage it’s at now.â€?

Future Worlds helps nurture aspiring University entrepreneurs and cutting-edge technologies through one-to-one support and a network of seasoned founders, investors and millionaire entrepreneurs. BOON emerged this spring when the team first pitched the idea at an annual Dragons’ Den-style investment event. The entrepreneurs have since been accelerated on their journey through early-stage funding from the Web Science Institute’s Z21 Innovation Fund.

The pair now have a growing team and in January will be showcasing the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the largest consumer technology show in the world.

The BOON gift service is available now at https://www.boon.gifts/.

Researchers from the University of Southampton are using machine learning techniques to develop the next generation of wear sensing in machines such as planes and cars.

A multi-disciplinary team, including expertise from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), have been awarded over £1m to miniaturise existing sensing technology within the field of tribology, the science and engineering of interacting surfaces in relative motion.

The project, which is a partnership with General Electric Company, Schaeffler KG, Senseye and Shell, aims to shed light on the fundamental principles of early wear. Researchers will focus on developing and investigating how well electrostatic micro-sensing arrays with embedded electronics detect tribological transitions related to wear and friction in machine component contacts.

Professor Robert Wood, Principal Investigator, says: ‘This grant will allow us to build on 20 years of research at Southampton into electrostatic based condition monitoring of tribological contacts to allow far better temporal and spatial resolution and thus earlier detection of distress.â€?

The four-year Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council project will draw upon expertise from Dr Terry Harvey from the National Centre for Advanced Tribology at Southampton (nCATS) together with Professor Mahesan Niranjan and Dr Nick Harris from ECS. Researchers identified that the combination of data from arrays of embedded sensors close to the wear surface, being developed within ECS, and the application of advanced machine learning techniques to the resulting data streams offer the promise of more accurate and earlier prognostic data for machines despite the variation of use cases that may be seen.

“New sensors will be the link that enables the practical application of machine learning to mechanical systems, which will unlock much more than just new information on wear,â€? Dr Harris explains. “The combination of experience from nCATS and ECS, together with the industrial partners, will allow new approaches to condition monitoring and predictive maintenance across a broad spectrum of industry.â€?

Professor Niranjan says, “The subject of machine learning is of increasing importance in a wide range of multi-disciplinary problems involving large and complex datasets. Here in Southampton, we are proud of our research in the subject, as well as its integration into our taught programmes at undergraduate and masters’ levels. In this project, I am particularly excited about using modern machine learning algorithms combined with domain knowledge and data gathered from specifically designed instruments and experiments.â€?

The grant will build on existing collaborations from two Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professors to nCATS from Schaeffler and GE Aviation.

Dr Harvey says, “We have been working on electrostatic sensor for many years now, delving into the fundamental of what of the sensors are seeing but all at the macro-scale. This project will allow us to push the technology forward by developing arrays of micro-electrostatic sensors that will us detect charge at far higher resolutions than previously possible but also effectively map it. This will mean that the amount of information being processed is multiplied and this is where machine learning will play a vital part in the project.â€?

Postgraduate researcher Ben Fletcher from the University of Southampton has been awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

The electronics engineer, who is completing an internship in the Arm-ECS Research Centre, will use the funding to continue his exploration of low cost 3D integration for the Internet of Things.

He was presented the prize at the IET Achievement Awards ceremony in Central London last month, which celebrated high-quality engineers and encouraged them to develop successful academic research careers.

Ben spent the first 18 months of his PhD within Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science and started an internship with Arm in the summer. He is now pre-dominantly based at Arm’s Cambridge office, within the Devices Circuits and Systems research group.

“I’m delighted to have been awarded a postgraduate prize,â€? Ben says. “The IET Postgraduate Awards are highly competitive, so this is a great affirmation that the research I’m doing is innovative and significant. I have already been working with industrial sponsors at Arm to fabricate a test chip demonstrating the technology that I have been developing. The award will provide useful funding for the testing and evaluation of this chip but is also a great way of raising the profile of my research and reaching a wider audience.â€?

Integrated circuits (ICs), or silicon chips, are the building blocks of almost all electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops and tablets. Three dimensional integrated circuits are a new generation of ICs that integrate multiple layers vertically, allowing devices to incorporate more diverse functionality and function quicker, whilst consuming less power. Ben’s research is investigating innovative ways of communicating data between the layers within these new stacked 3D-ICs using wireless communication through inductive coupling.

IET Postgraduate Awards are made on a competitive basis and are assessed by the IET Scholarships Committee. In total, five scholarships and prizes have been awarded this year.

Nick Winser CBE, IET President, said: “Our Postgraduate Scholarships and Prizes form part of the IET’s annual investment of over £1 million in the next generation of engineers. The recipients are carrying out leading research at some of the world’s most recognised universities and their research is supporting the advancement of knowledge throughout the global engineering and technology community.â€?

First year Computer Science student Wojciech Rozowski from the University of Southampton has devised a new synchronisation element for high-performance computing that can optimise access to shared data.

The innovation, which draws upon his studies of experimental hardware technology that started as a high school hobby, can improve the performance of operating systems on multi-core computers.

Wojciech presented the findings at last month’s Science: Polish Perspective 2018 conference at the University of Oxford, alongside hundreds of renowned Polish scientists.

The BSc Computer Science student has tapped into the potential of hardware transactional synchronisation extensions (TSX) technology, which has been shown to guarantee an up to 41% increase in performance of handling critical data.

“The efficiency of multi-core processors isn’t in linear relationship with the number of its cores,â€? Wojciech explains. “The increased number of cores is accompanied by the occurrence of more data conflicts. As a result of this study, a new synchronisation element has been created which combines TSX and spinlocks in such a way that it guarantees error-free handling of all critical data and it uses transactional memory optimisations wherever possible.â€?

Wojciech presented an early version of this project at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, USA, the world’s largest and most prestigious science fair for pre-university students. His work was acclaimed by academics and placed 4th for the Systems Software and Special Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

“Developing this project has been an extremely interesting and fun experience for me and a great opportunity to learn new things in areas of parallel computing and computer systems,â€? Wojciech says. “My ultimate dream would be to write a scientific journal publication about this research. However, to do so I know that I must next improve my testing methods in such a way to get reliable data covering a broader range of test cases.â€? Wojciech has performed a series of benchmarking tests which proved the technology optimises data access in certain cases and his new synchronisation element has been successfully implemented into the Unix operating system, a popular platform for high-performance computing.

Visiting Professor Dr David Flynn has been honoured for the exceptional impact of his career with a prestigious medal from the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

The co-director of the Arm-ECS Research Centre, an award-winning research collaboration between Arm and the University of Southampton, has been named a co-recipient of the IEEE and Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) 2019 James Clerk Maxwell Medal.

The honour recognises ground-breaking contributions in the development of electronics and electrical engineering, or related fields.

Dr Flynn has served as a Visiting Professor in Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science for the past decade and has nurtured a strong partnership between the University and his employer, Arm. The Arm-ECS Research Centre advances future mobile and embedded systems and was recently shortlisted for Research Collaboration of the Year at the 2018 TechWorks Awards.

The IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal was established in 2006 and is named in honour of the 19th century Scottish mathematician and physicist who laid the foundations of electromagnetic wave theory and radio communications. Dr Flynn will share the honour with former Arm Fellow David Jaggar, with their award citation commending their ‘contributions to the development of novel Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architectures adopted in over 100 billion microprocessors worldwide’.

Dr Flynn said: “As engineering practitioners it is with surprise and delight that David and I accept such a prestigious award and reflect back on the computer scientists and electronics engineers, educators and creative business partnership visionaries that inspired us in our early work at Advanced RISC Machines/ARM Ltd.â€?

Dr Flynn is a Director of Technology at Arm in Cambridge and a senior member of the IEEE. He is attached to Southampton’s Centre for Internet of Things and Pervasive Systems and regularly provides industrial oversight for postgraduate research. Under his direction with Southampton’s Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, the Arm-ECS Research Centre has focussed on advanced design methods, architectures and their practical validations for energy-efficient and dependable single-core and multi-core processor systems.

To date, the Centre’s projects have fabricated 12 new test chips, released three open source tools, collaborated on co-authoring 32 papers, graduated six co-supervised PhD students and completed 22 internships in Cambridge.

Improved awareness of poor indoor air quality could lead to healthier and more productive offices, according to research published by the University of Southampton.

Dr Stephen Snow, from Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), has made several recommendations to address indoor air quality in a report commissioned by the Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Indoor air quality is a leading cause of health effects and reduced cognitive performance in offices, but has until recently taken a back seat to the more commonly reported concerns over outdoor air quality.

The research in ECS’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group evaluated social and behavioural factors that affect the air quality in offices and shared, among many outcomes, that low cost air quality sensors could improve awareness of poor conditions and trigger actions that lead to healthier workplaces.

“Because we become acclimatised to the space we're in, cognitive performance can be impacted by inadequate ventilation prior to awareness of the declining indoor air quality,â€? Stephen explains. “This report outlines opportunities for how indoor air quality visualisations might be designed to inform and support healthier ventilation practices in naturally ventilated offices.â€?

Findings from the two-part report, which was facilitated by the Public Policy Southampton team, have now been presented to Defra, with discussions for follow-up work underway.

Stephen’s research placed a specific focus on the sphere of influence of occupants for their office’s air quality, rather than exploring engineering solutions or building performance factors over which users have no control.

In highlighting the potential rewards of investment in low cost office sensors, the research made a number of recommendations including that such devices should be ambient, viewable with a quick glance, unobtrusive, provide immediately actionable information and offer human analogies such as pictures of an office worker progressively falling asleep as air quality deteriorates.

The research also suggested that indoor air quality campaigns could focus on prompts for regular and active breaks from seated office work and offer insight into applicable behavioural models to guide future interventions.

As part of a secondment available through Public Policy Southampton and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Impact Accelerator Account funding, Stephen had the opportunity to draw upon and expand his existing research as part of the REFRESH Project, led by Principal Investigator m.c. schraefel, into how social factors can affect interactions with building controls such as windows and radiators as well as the design of office-based air quality monitors.

An electronic version of the ECS report is available through the Public Policy Southampton website.