Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at the University of Southampton was ranked second for graduate prospects and first in the Russell Group for student satisfaction in the Complete University Guide 2019 league table.

Southampton was placed fourth in the country for EEE and Computer Science returned to the top ten at seventh, as the University rose six places to 20th overall out of 131 institutions in the rankings. In the South East, Southampton’s Computer Science offering was ranked second only to the University of Oxford.

Physics and Astronomy, another department in Southampton’s Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, maintained its top 20 placement in the rankings, finishing 19th. The subject was ranked first in the South East for student satisfaction and second in the same category for the whole Russell Group.

In total, nine Southampton subject areas were placed in the national top 10 by the 2019 guide. EEE and Computer Science are joined by Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering (4th), Anatomy and Physiology (8th), Aural and Oral Sciences (3rd), Civil Engineering (6th), Communication and Media Studies (9th), Education (10th) and Mechanical Engineering (6th).

The Complete University Guide – one of three principal UK-based rankings for UK universities – is based on a wide range of criteria including UCAS entry tariffs, student satisfaction, research excellence and intensity, graduate prospects, student-staff ratio, university spending on services and facilities, graduates receiving a first or upper second class honours degree, and degree completion.

The University of Southampton is set to join The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s prestigious national institute for data science.

Subject to signing a partnership agreement, it is anticipated that Southampton and the University of Bristol will be working with the Institute and its university partners to develop collaborative programmes of research from summer 2018. The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising the emerging field of data science.

All new universities joining the Turing network have been admitted based on the excellence of their research and its alignment with the Institute’s research interests, their ability to bring new expertise and opportunities which add to the core strengths of the Institute and its existing partners, and their willingness to contribute financially to the Institute.

Professor Mark Spearing, Vice-President (Research and Enterprise), University of Southampton, commented: “We are a pioneering world-leader in computer, data and web science and becoming a university partner of The Alan Turing Institute is an important step as we seek to further expand our capabilities in harmony with other world-leaders in these fields. This partnership comes at a time when the digital world faces many challenges and it is only through collaborative efforts like this that we’ll succeed in addressing the world’s societal and scientific needs.â€?

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the University added: “The University of Southampton’s ambitions in Data Science and Data-centric Engineering are closely aligned with the strategic aims of the Alan Turing Institute. Our expertise here is leading the way in data collection, integration and conversion into knowledge and evidence that informs business, industrial and governmental strategy. I welcome our membership of the Alan Turing Institute as a defining moment for Southampton, reflecting our continued key contribution to Data Science and its impact worldwide.â€?

The addition of Southampton and Bristol marks the end of the first phase of expansion for the Turing, and the focus over the coming months will be to assimilate the new universities into the Institute’s community and to generate ambitious collaborative research programmes.

Alan Wilson, CEO of The Alan Turing Institute, said: “Together, the Turing’s university network represents a powerful coalition of research excellence in data science and artificial intelligence in the UK. It is with real pleasure that we welcome Bristol and Southampton into the Turing network, adding their substantial expertise to the Institute’s already formidable network of academic talent.â€?

Southampton and Bristol join a growing network of university partners in the Alan Turing Institute: since November 2017 six universities (Birmingham, Exeter, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Queen Mary University of London) have been announced as new partners, joining Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick and UCL who were selected as founder members when the Institute was created in 2015.

Researchers from the 13 universities will work together alongside the Institute’s industry, government and third sector partners to spearhead cutting-edge research and apply this research to real-world problems, with the goal to create lasting effects for science, society and the world we live in.

Professor Tom Melham, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford (one of the five founding universities of The Alan Turing Institute) and Institute Trustee commented: “The expansion of the Turing’s university network and the associated potential for collaboration will enable us to undertake even more ambitious and impactful research in data science and AI. As a founder member of the Institute, we are delighted to welcome Bristol and Southampton and look forward to working with all the university partners of the Turing to bring UK talent and expertise in these new technologies to the fore.â€?

Researchers from the University of Southampton have won European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants totalling more than €12 million.

Professor Lajos Hanzo, from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and Professors Peter Kazansky and Nikolay Zheludev, from the Optoelectronics Research Centre, have raised over €7.5 million for pioneering research in the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering as three of five funding awards at the University.

It is the second time that Lajos has won an ERC Advanced Grant, joining an esteemed group of only 29 other UK researchers to have accomplished this in the last 10 years.

He has successfully bid for €2.49 million for his QuantCom research project, which aims to solve part of the ‘quantum jigsaw puzzle’ and contribute to the conception of the wireless Quantum Internet, or Qinternet, conceived for seamless high-speed connectivity across the globe at uncompromised security.

Lajos, Head of the Next Generation Wireless Research Group, says, “It is a humbling experience to contribute to this new wave of frontier research, which would not have been possible without the closely-knit collaboration with my much valued colleagues in ECS.â€?

Professor Peter Kazansky has been awarded €2.5 million for his project entitled ENIGMA (ENgIneerinG MAterial properties with advanced laser direct writing). The project will examine the interaction between intense ultra-short light pulses and matter at, or below, the wavelength scale, reaching states of matter found only deep in the cores of the Earth and other planets. Professor Nikolay Zheludev has been awarded €2.57 million for his FLEET (FLying ElectromagnEtic Toroids) project, which will study the generation, detection and interaction with matter of Flying Toroids, a type of light pulses never experimentally studied before.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering, says, “ERC Advanced Grants are a prestigious and competitive source of funding and I’d like to congratulate Lajos, Peter and Nikolay on their excellent funding awards. This unprecedented success demonstrates the quality and breadth of research being led in our Departments as our researchers advance ground-breaking developments in their field.â€?

Professor Malcolm Levitt, from Southampton’s School of Chemistry, and Professor Tony Brown, from the School of Geography and Environment, have also received a combined €5.42 million for projects focusing on the use of use of ancient agricultural terraces and Enhanced Spectroscopy applications respectively.

A team of cyber savvy students from the University of Southampton have placed second in the Inter-ACE Challenge, the UK’s biggest cyber security competition for university students.

Laurie Kirkaldy, Josh Curry, David Young and Izzy Whistlecroft – also known as ‘The Hapless Techno Weenies’ from Southampton – brought home a prize of £3,000 after finishing runners-up to the University of Edinburgh in a field of 34 teams, drawn from 18 of the country’s top universities accredited as Academic Centres of Excellence (ACE) in Cyber Security Research.

This is the third consecutive year that Southampton teams have placed in the competition’s top three. Laurie (4th year student, MEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering), Josh (4th year student, MEng Electromechanical Engineering) and Izzy (PhD candidate, Cyber Security) all competed last year. For David (Mathematical Sciences graduate and current PhD candidate, Cyber Security), this marked his third consecutive Inter-ACE appearance.

The competition, supported by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, is designed to attract the next generation of cyber security talent.

Over two days, the students faced 20 challenges set by experts from the host University of Cambridge and sponsors including Context IS and Palo Alto Networks. The students faced a number of different scenarios, from preventing a hack on a UK city’s infrastructure to a tap on an undersea communications cable. Connected devices such as a children’s toy were also used to demonstrate the impact of hacking techniques.

Now in its third year, Inter-ACE was established to help resolve the vast and growing cyber security skills gap, with an estimated shortfall of 1.8m workers worldwide by 2022. Inter-ACE aims to inspire young tech enthusiasts into the cyber security sector, while also honing the skills of those who already have a strong aptitude for ethical hacking and helping them meet like-minded individuals and potential employers.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Director of the Southampton’s Cyber Security Academy, said: “Once again, our students have performed extremely well in a competition that challenges their ability to think and act quickly but precisely to an unexpected range of cyber security threats. Acting as a supervisor during the event, I was also able to see firsthand how well they worked as a team which also says a great deal about the quality of the learning environment at the Cyber Security Academy in Southampton.â€?

Professor Frank Stajano, Founder of Inter-ACE and Professor of Security and Privacy at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s no secret that the cyber security industry is suffering from a large and growing skills gap. We must do more to attract a more diverse pool of talent into the field. This is about demonstrating that careers in cyber security not only help to keep your country, your friends and your family safe, but are varied, valued and most of all fun.

“There is still much more to be achieved, but I have been delighted over the last three years to be welcoming a growing number of female participants and contestants from increasingly diverse backgrounds to the two-day competition. We had 18 women competing this year, as opposed to just two when we started! It's working. There is no set profile for a cyber security professional and Inter-ACE contributes to reaching more people with that important messageâ€?.

The winning team from Edinburgh will now compete with the best of the USA at C2C –‘Cambridge2Cambridge’, a transatlantic contest jointly organised by MIT and the University of Cambridge, and hosted by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts this summer.

The Southampton team can join them by competing in an online qualifying event.

Researchers from the University of Southampton will help ease access to over 800,000 datasets across Europe as part of a three-year contract funded by the European Commission.

Open data experts in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will continue their partnership with a continental consortium working on the European Data Portal, a platform that harvests the metadata of public sector information across 34 nations.

The contract renewal, worth several million Euros, will drive ongoing development of the portal along with related data economy studies and consulting services. The project will tap into Southampton’s extensive expertise in the field to improve current human-data interaction, helping entrepreneurs and businesses exploit the resources to extract maximum insight and value.

Professor Elena Simperl, from Southampton’s Web and Internet Science research group says, “The European Data Portal has made a huge quantity of data available – and this number will only increase – however there is a risk that if there isn’t an effective search tool then users will struggle to find data that is relevant. We want to improve the usefulness of the portal by improving the way people search through and make sense of datasets.

“Researchers in ECS have done a lot of work to publish open government data in the UK and I hope this new contract will provide the opportunity for lessons we have learned through national open data portals to benefit other EU countries.â€?

A study published by consortium partner Capgemini in 2015 estimated the market size for open data in Europe would increase by around 37% to €75.7 billion by 2020. Public sector information made available through the European Data Portal includes figures on business, defence, education, health and transport.

Research Fellow Dr Luis-Daniel Ibáñez and Senior Research Assistant Johanna Walker will be part of Southampton’s contribution to the new contract.

“This prestigious project confirms the position we have in open government data and is important because of how it ties to other ECS research that is understanding how people engage with data and evidence,â€? Elena says. “Southampton has been at the forefront of the open data movement internationally and I look forward to seeing this continue for the next three years and beyond.â€?

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton are heading for the local pub to present their latest pioneering research as part of the international Pint of Science Festival.

The annual Pint of Science Festival was launched in 2012 and takes place in nearly 300 cities around the globe. This year's festival runs from May 14-16 and brings some of the most brilliant scientists to venues across the UK to discuss their research and findings with members of the public in an accessible location – in the pub.

As part of the Festival, ECS researchers Dr Gopal Ramchurn and Professor Koushik Maharatna will be exploring the world of Artificial Intelligence in an evening entitled I, Robot.

Many’s the time that Fantasy Football league performance has been debated in a pub environment but it’s a new signing for Dr Ramchurn, Director of the Centre for Machine Intelligence in ECS. Gopal will tell the story of Squadguru, an algorithm he developed to play the English Premier League Fantasy Football – and which beat 99% of human players on average. He’ll also talk about the difficulties of taking the algorithm out from the labs to the real world and why AI will not beat all humans at everything...yet.

Koushik Maharatna, Professor in Signal Processing Systems Design in ECS, works on next-generation mobile healthcare systems. In his talk, Koushik considers how a ‘predictive’ approach to remotely monitoring the health of populations could help reduce costs of long-term care by predicting impending episodes of chronic disease. He’ll also identify the elements hindering the adoption of such systems and a strategy to overcome these challenges.

Other Pint of Science evenings include In the Dark, exploring supermassive black holes and the ‘darkest’ areas of science, and A Journey Though Galaxies which looks at the formation, evolution and research simulations of galaxies. Both evenings are delivered by Southampton’s school of Physics and Astronomy.

The I, Robot talks take place at Southampton’s Stein Garten on Tuesday 15 May. Tickets for this, and all Pint of Science activities in Southampton, are available online from pintofscience.co.uk/events/southampton with each evening costing only £4.

Machine learning experts from the University of Southampton have completed a £100,000 seed investment deal for a retail technology startup founded from PhD research in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

Aura Vision Labs will join the Collider accelerator this summer having innovated a cloud-based platform that can detect the gender, age and clothing styles of every person in a crowd.

The marketing, advertising and technology – or MadTech – startup uses computer vision and biometric identification techniques to analyse CCTV video footage, producing valuable insights into customer behaviour that can help boost sales performance and loyalty.

Co-founders Daniel Martinho-Corbishley and Jaime Lomeli have built the startup on PhD research undertaken in ECS' Vision, Learning and Control research group and have been based for the past year in the University’s Future Worlds incubator. The team will move this summer as they join the London-based Collider accelerator, one of Europe’s leading hubs for the MadTech industry.

“We’re thrilled to announce this important step in our startup journey and are looking forward to progressing our business alongside our new investors,â€? Jaime says. “With a few other offers on the table, we decided to close this deal because of the valuable experience the Collider team can provide. Our interests are well aligned. In the coming months we will be working further on our platform and exploring in detail what elements can create even greater value for our customers.â€?

Aura Vision Labs’ cost effective solution captures up to 100 per cent of in-store visitor demographics, dwell spots, walk-ins and walk-bys. This data can be accessed and analysed by retailers through a cloud-based platform to improve conversion rates, act on missed opportunities and target specific customer segments, all without needing to access sensitive personal information.

The tech startup was launched last spring when the team first pitched the idea at an on-campus Dragons’ Den style investment competition. The entrepreneurs have been based in the University’s Future Worlds incubator since the summer and received early-stage support from the Web Science Institute’s Z21 Innovation Fund.

“The past year has been a great experience,â€? Jaime adds. “We’ve been continually learning and developing through mentoring and support from the University. This January, we exhibited with the Future Worlds incubator at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and this has resulted in several very important leads that are becoming our first key partnerships. We plan to release a scalable platform in the next few months, before raising a second round of investment to scale up and expand our customer base.â€?

Find out more about Aura Vision Labs through their video, made by the University's Future Worlds incubator.

Computer scientists from the University of Southampton will support key developments of global scale decentralised systems as part of a new EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum launched by the European Commission.

Experts from Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will work with European research groups and industry partners to shape blockchain technologies that will impact digital services across different sectors, e.g. in the healthcare, finance and government services.

Blockchain technologies bring about high levels of traceability and security in online transactions by storing blocks of information that are distributed across a network. The new EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum will help Europe seize new opportunities offered by this technology by building expertise and leadership in the field.

Professor Elena Simperl and Research Fellow Dr Luis-Daniel Ibáñez from ECS’s Web and Internet Science research group will publish findings from recent research and innovation activities as part of Southampton’s contribution to the international consortium.

“The EU Blockchain Observatory is one of the first projects of this kind to be supported at a European level and will provide a comprehensive, holistic overview to a field that has been advancing at great pace,â€? Elena explains. “The University of Southampton brings in unique expertise in studies and methods to blockchain technologies which will have profound socio-technical impacts in the near future. Our work in this project will result in white papers on specialist subjects that inform thought leadership frameworks and policies in the blockchain space. In particular, we will be promoting our recent activities around interoperable distributed ledgers and their applications in creative industries, government and science, drawing upon principles that have already made the Web so successful.â€?

The EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum was launched last month February and continues the European Union’s rich investment in the field. By 2020, up to €340 million in projects could be funded through the EU’s FP7 and Horizon 2020 research programmes that could draw upon blockchain technologies.

Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, says, “Technologies like blockchain can help reduce costs while increasing trust, traceability and security. They have huge potential for making social and economic transactions more secure online by guarding against an attack and removing the need for any middleman. We want to build on Europe's substantial talent base and excellent startups to become a leading world region that will develop and invest in the rollout of blockchain.â€?