Professor Jan Sykulski, Head of the Electrical Power Engineering Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, visited Poland last month to receive the title of Professor from the President of the Polish Republic. In Poland professorial titles are awarded by the state, on the nomination of a university, and as a mark of his personal distinction, Professor Sykulski was nominated by the Universities of Lodz, Poznan, and Szczecin. He received the title from President Aleksander Kwasniewski during a formal ceremony in Warsaw.

The answer is yes, and not only that: they can also evaluate what will be the most successful strategy for conflict resolution, including re-formulating their action, or evading confrontation. Argument is used by computer agents only as the last resort.

The effectiveness of argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) for computer agents operating in multi-agent systems is assessed in a new paper co-authored by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Professor Jennings will be presenting the paper next week in New York, at AAMAS 2004, one of the largest conferences in the world of computer research.

Agents are autonomous computer systems increasingly used in a wide range of industrial and commercial domains, including robotics, e-commerce, computer games, and information retrieval. They are regarded as one of the most significant new technologies in computer science--not only a promising new technology, but also a new way of thinking, fundamental to the successful development of the next generation of distributed, open and dynamic computer systems.

Professor Jennings is co-chair of AAMAS 2004, and leads a large UK contingent of computer scientists to the conference. He is one of the world"s leading exponents of agent technology and helped pioneer the use of agent-based techniques for real-world applications.

"Conflicts are inevitable in a multi-agent system," says Professor Jennings, "in which autonomous entities pursue their own goals. If the agents are to be able to resolve these problems—which can arise due to pressure on resources or as a result of conflicts of information—then ABN provides a meaningful interaction, enabling the agents to work towards the best result."

"Artificial intelligence programmes of this kind can deal with difficult problems and aid humans in many difference environments. For this reason they are increasingly being used in the Internet, in our homes, and in the workplace," he adds "But to improve their performance, we need to ensure they have the ability to overcome real-world problems such as conflict."

A crucial aspect of agents is their potential in e-commerce. "Worldwide markets become ever more complex," says Professor Jennings, "and time frames narrow. Companies are keen to automate parts of their activities and we are aiming to design programmes that can mirror and occasionally improve human decision-making."

Researchers at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science have welcomed the conclusions of the report into the future of academic publishing conducted by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, and published today.

The Committee has recommended that all researchers should self-archive their papers within a month of publication, and that universities should be funded to provide the facilities to allow them to do this. This fulfils the vision and principles under which the ECS scientists have been working, as part of the Open Access movement. 'The Committee's conclusions, if followed by universities in this country, will improve the visibility and impact of UK research,' says Dr Les Carr, who has been leading the digital archiving research at ECS.

ECS researchers have been at the forefront of the Open Access movement, promoting and demonstrating the benefits of Open Access archiving of research output, as well as developing software to allow institutions to easily set up their own archives (software.eprints.org). Their work has been funded by JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and has been instrumental in advancing the Open Access debate.

'In a move two years ago that prefigured the conclusions of the parliamentary report, it was made mandatory for our own researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science to self-archive all their research papers, resulting in the most populated institutional archive in the UK (eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk),' said Dr Carr. 'This has provided a very positive and personal example to us of the benefits that can derive from Open Access. Everyone wants to see their research papers reaching as wide an audience as possible and Open Access provides the best way to achieve this.'

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, received an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University at their graduation ceremony on 13 July. The fellowship to Professor Hall recognized her distinction in computer science, and her presidency this year of the British Computer Society. In her graduation address Professor Hall highlighted the imbalance between the high proportion of women graduating in the life sciences, and the much smaller number graduating in engineering and computer science. Emphasizing that future developments in advanced knowledge technologies and biologically-inspired computing would require the skills and expertise that women could contribute, she urged all the graduates, but especially the women in the audience, to be assertive, bold, and confident in pursuing their future careers.

This week's graduation ceremony at the University of Southampton sees a double celebration for Professor of Telecommunications, Lajos Hanzo. Not only will Professor Hanzo be awarded a higher doctorate (DSc) by the University for his distinguished lifetime research in adaptive wireless communications systems, but at the same ceremony his son, also named Lajos Hanzo, will receive a First Class Master of Computer Engineering degree.

Over the last 10 years Professor Hanzo has established a reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on adaptive wireless communications systems. He has co-authored ten Anglo-American John Wiley/IEEE Press books on mobile radio communications and multimedia signal processing, and with the rise of mobile multimedia communications his work has become of crucial importance.

'If the wireless Internet is to become a reality, then there are a number of further research challenges which have to be overcome,' says Professor Hanzo. 'The ether is a hostile wave-propagation medium, especially when transmitting the high amount of multimedia information that is needed to create the impression of virtual presence. We are already accustomed to sophisticated services over wires or optical cables, but to create 'tele-presence', transmitting over radio waves, will require a further quantum leap from the current state of the art represented by the mobile telephone.'

To add to the celebrations, Professor Hanzo was last week elected as a Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, a highly prestigious honour, which follows his election last year as Fellow of the IEEE in the United States.

Professor Hanzo held academic posts in Hungary and Germany, before joining the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in 1986. He was awarded the Chair of Telecommunications in 1998, and leads the Communications research group in ECS, which has many industrial partners.

His son, Lajos, will next year be embarking on postgraduate research, aiming for a PhD degree in mobile multimedia networking at the University of Surrey.

Over 300 ECS students, accompanied by families and friends, attended this year's Graduation ceremonies at the University of Southampton.

Addressing the guests at the reception and prize-giving ceremonies which followed Graduation, Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School, congratulated the new graduates on their achievements, and urged them to stay in touch with the School in the future.

An innovation at this year's event was the plasma screen in the Zepler Foyer, which carried scrolling lists of all the graduates and prize-winners, as well as photos from the ceremonies which had only just taken place.

From next year the School will be implementing a new alumni programme to maintain strong links with all its graduates worldwide.

Researchers at the universities of Southampton and Vienna have demonstrated that the complex and individual performance styles of concert pianists such as Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz can be modelled in unique "performance alphabets", providing a method of recognizing their performance styles by computer, and also, possibly, reconstructing them.

Concert pianist Glenn Gould had a unique and instantly recognizable performance style, for which he is rightly renowned. Indeed, the extent to which pianists such as Gould, Horowitz and Uchida have a discernibly individual style of playing is recognized not just by classical music aficionados, who can hear the differences, but also by computers, which can analyse the differences and model them.

Now a group of researchers at the Universities of Vienna and Southampton have made significant advances in demonstrating repeated and identifiable differences in individual performances of the same work, to such an extent that a "performance alphabet" could be drawn up for each composer.

Not only does this provide a means of identifying individual pianists using only minimal information from audio recordings, it also means that one can countenance the possibility of modelling aspects of a performance of a piece as it would have been played, for example, by Horowitz.

The researchers at the Medical University of Vienna, led by Professor Gerhard Widmer took two measures of the way the same Mozart sonatas were played by Glenn Gould, Daniel Barenboim, Andras Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Roland Batik, and Maria Joao Pires. These measures were tempo, as measured against a fixed tempo, and volume, or loudness. Professor John Shawe-Taylor of the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science has led a group developing new methods of analysing the results obtained by the Vienna team.

"Different players have different ways of building tension or expression in the music," says John Shawe-Taylor describing the work of the Vienna team, "and they represent this raw data for every note and progression of the music as a trajectory, which can be represented visually in tempo-loudness space as a "performance worm"." The Vienna researchers have constructed a visual representation of these changes, which can also be compared.

The researchers then obtained certain characteristics of the performance by analysing the movement of the worm. "A performer may consistently produce loudness/tempo changes unique to themselves at specific points in a piece," says John Shawe-Taylor, "for example in association with particular cadences."

The researchers at Vienna have for example observed that Mitsuko Uchida demonstrates a particular way of combining a crescendo-decrescendo with a slowing down during a loudness maximum. These patterns were often repeated in Mozart performances by Mitsuko Uchida, but were rarely found when analysing the recordings of other performers.

The novel analysis techniques applied to the performance worm data at the University of Southampton were able to distinguish the different performers based on a relatively small sample of their performances.

On a more speculative note, John Shawe-Taylor says: "Basically we are seeking common patterns across two different ways of looking at an event. On the one hand we have the musical score, and on the other, its interpretation by an individual concert pianist.

"If we could combine our description of the way the piece is performed and the musical score, and discern the connection between the two, then we might be able to generate aspects of a Horowitz performance of a piece that he had never actually played."

Minute amounts of organic pollutants�including oestrone�can now be detected in river water as a result of a new optical sensing instrument realised in a project funded by the EU's Environment Programme.

Pollution in water sources has been identified as a major source of environmental hazard, most recently associated with gender changes in fish, and implicated in falling levels of male fertility. Monitoring water quality and identifying pollution sources is therefore crucially important in river management.

Across the EU, methods of water monitoring need to be developed and implemented to ensure effective standardized enforcement of EU water quality directives. With partners in the UK, Germany, Spain, and the Slovak Republic, the EU-funded AWACSS (Automated Water Analyser Computer Supported System) project has developed a cost-effective online water-monitoring instrument that will help meet the needs of water managers.

The new instrument has drawn on the skills of research scientists and environmentalists and has been successfully demonstrated in river waters. It is designed for networking across Europe, and further developments are expected to enable early detection and warning.

The system uses optical sensors to enable rapid, simultaneous and high-sensitivity fluorescence detection of up to 32 organic pollutants and pesticides in river water. Amongst the pollutants to be successfully detected is oestrone, which occurs naturally and as a by-product of the contraceptive pill.

"Optical sensors have great potential in simultaneous, rapid, high-sensitivity measurement of multiple pollutants in water," said Professor James Wilkinson of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton.

"The biosensor chip enables us to measure a large number of low molecular weight organic pollutants, and we have successfully detected levels at below 1 nanogram per litre for oestrone, which is one hundred times better than the original project target.

"Ultimately the instrument will be networked so that pollution sources can be monitored remotely with full automation," he continued, "and trend analysis and early-warning capabilities will be provided."

It is envisaged that the network will be distributed over a water catchment area, allowing a source of pollution to be localized early and characterized rapidly. In cases of severe water pollution, precautionary systems will be activated automatically or manually by operators of wastewater treatment plants.

Last year's widely disruptive power cuts in the UK, Europe and the United States demonstrated the extent to which we rely on electricity, and the catastrophic consequences to all aspects of our lives when the supply fails. A unique facility being opened this week at the University of Southampton is intended to help avoid these damaging incidents by providing the specialized research and testing facilities on which the power supply industry depends. This Friday (10th September) sees the opening of a major extension to the University's High Voltage Laboratory, more than doubling its size through the creation of a new high voltage hall, in addition to new laboratories providing important new research and testing facilities. Guests at the ceremony will represent the electricity industry and academic research groups throughout the UK. The Laboratory will be officially opened by the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bill Wakeham, accompanied by Mrs Susan Davies, who will name the Lab after her husband, the late Professor Tony Davies. It was Professor Davies's vision that led to the building of the Laboratory extension, but sadly he died shortly after completing the plans. The High Voltage Laboratory is therefore a fitting memorial to his life and work. Combining academic research and commercial testing, the new Laboratory will play a major part in enabling the electricity power supply industry to undertake the research and consultancy on which it depends for successful electricity transmission in the future. With the decline of commercial research and testing facilities as a result of reorganization in the power supply industry, the UK desperately needs specialized research laboratories of this kind. "Power engineering is a central feature of our work," says Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The Laboratory has been extended and updated as a result of Government investment, a significant recognition of the value of our research capability. We are also one of only three UK universities selected to be founding partners in the Power Academy initiative, which will train new graduates for the industry. We now have one of the largest and best-equipped high voltage labs in Europe and fully intend to share our expertise with the electricity industry.