A new anti-spam feature devised by MailScanner mastermind, Julian Field, could lessen the amount of junk mail that companies and individuals receive.

The new development works by using a spam filtering system which scores messages, deleting those which are the most ‘spammy’ and wrapping the remaining ones in other messages so that if they happen to be offensive, the recipient is shielded from the full impact. Spam and viruses are now persistent and recurring threats to the security of the Internet, threatening the operations of business and public networks, companies, and government departments, as well as personal email accounts worldwide. Julian, who is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, began developing MailScanner in 2000, and it has now become the world’s most widely-used email security and anti-spam system, protecting around 40,000 sites around the world, and blocking 500 million spam messages daily. This month, he launches a Guide to MailScanner which brings together all the information about the software for its thousands of users around the world. According to Julian, the success of his operation lies in its open source system.He comments: ‘To securely perform its role, MailScanner must be reliable and trustworthy. The only way to achieve the required level of trust is to be open source, an approach that commercial suppliers are not willing to take. By virtue of being open source, the technology has been reviewed many times over by some of the world’s best and brightest in the field of computer security.’ Julian claims that the system’s spam handling technology is ahead of the competition. He comments: ‘Our spam handling features are much more flexible than other systems. Even if our system thinks a message is spam, it can still let it through but can wrap it up in another message so that if it is offensive, it won’t hit you in the face.’ The success of MailScanner can be judged from the fact that it is used in some of the world’s leading organizations, including Vodafone Europe, US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities, and Amnesty International, Friends Of The Earth and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering. Julian continues to develop MailScanner’s capabilities and upgrade the system: ‘By being open source, I can react very quickly to add extra layers of defence when the virus writers try to exploit a newly discovered vulnerability in users' email applications,’ he says. ‘MailScanner does not solely rely on the virus scanners to protect messages--there are multiple levels of defence so that users are protected from new virus outbreaks before the commercial (closed-source) AV vendors publish detection signatures for them.’ The MailScanner book was written and published to provide a single central easy-to-use resource that brings together information about using MailScanner from many different locations on the net to help all the administrators who use it. It also provides a very in-depth analysis of the design of MailScanner to assist more advanced users managing complex configurations for large sites. An article in last month’s PC PRO magazine fully underlined Julian’s role in the global fight against viruses: ‘How many of you have “Julian Field gets run over by a busâ€? as a bullet point in your disaster recovery plan?’it warned.

Perpetuum, a new spin-out company from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has raised capital from the venture capitalists, IP2IPO Group plc. Perpetuum is developing integrated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) that harvest vibrational energy from the environment, which can then release the energy to run systems. The company aims to address the desire for small, lower power and wireless electronic devices, many of which currently depend on batteries. Perpetuum's self-powered microsystems are capable of generating power indefinitely, without maintenance or pollution. The company is able to produce fully integrated self-powered silicon integrated circuits that can interact with their environment and transmit data via a wireless link. Perpetuum's founders are Professor Neil White, Steve Beeby, John Tudor, and Nick Harris, who have worked together for over 15 years in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'Perpetuum represents the culmination of many years of research and development,' said Professor White. 'The formation of the company will enable us to respond to strong customer demand from many different sectors. I am delighted that IP2IPO has been involved with the company, and I look forward to working with the team to accelerate Perpetuum's development.' IP2IPO has acquired a 28.2 per cent stake in Perpetuum.

The use of agent-based computing systems can result in significant business savings, according to speakers at this year’s Agent Technology Conference (ATC).

The conference, which takes place in Zurich on Friday 1 October, will bring together world-leading agent technology experts and representatives from traditional industries to report on how they are using autonomous computer agents to perform functions in the workplace.

This year’s ATC will feature invited presentations from IT organizations and research centres, including Whitestein Technologies AG, CapGemini, Magenta Technology, Microsoft and Fujitsu. The conference is co-ordinated by the Universities of Southampton and Liverpool.

Speakers will raise awareness of how agent-based technologies can contribute to better businesses, allowing users to make real savings, particularly in the creation of virtual organizations, and in the manufacturing field where automated robots are becoming more commonplace.

The conference will also address some of the challenges which lie ahead. According to Professor Michael Luck from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and a member of the ATC Executive Committee, one of the main issues to be addressed is that of the changing nature of agent-based systems.

‘We are beginning to witness a change from closed systems to more open systems,’ he says, ‘such as agents bidding in auctions in the marketplace. As systems become more open, they will need to be developed further to allow smooth interaction and communication between agents.’

Professor Luck also believes that collaboration between agents, particularly in open systems, will only succeed if there is trust. In order for this to happen, a user must have confidence that an agent which represents them in an open system will work effectively on their behalf and be secure and tamper-proof. Further work is needed to ensure that this is the case.

A solution which allows computer agents to collude, rather than compete with each other, has won this year’s recreation of Axelrod’s classic Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma competition. The winning solution was devised by a team from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) which met the competition’s 20th anniversary challenge to resolve the original dilemma in a noisy environment where moves could be misinterpreted. Professor Nick Jennings, a member of the ECS winning team said: ‘We developed ways of looking at the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a more realistic environment and devised a way for agents to recognise and collude with one another despite the noise. Our solution beats the standard tit-for-tat strategy.’ The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma has been of interest to the world of computer science since the publication of Robert Axelrod’s seminal book in the 1980s. It presents a simple game between two prisoners, in which their combined choices to co-operate or defect, determines whether they are imprisoned or walk free. Both players make a choice and then their decisions are revealed and both receive scores. Up to this year, the most common strategy applied to the dilemma was tit-for-tat which consistently outperformed every strategy entered in the original competition. It starts out by co-operating, and then punishes any strategy that defects by defecting on the next move. The solution devised by ECS uses coding theory to enable agents to recognise one another and to transmit messages reliably over noisy communication channels. No outside communication is allowed so the agents have to recognise one another by playing a specific sequence of moves at the start of each game. Dr Alex Rogers, another ECS team member said: “A key question in future computing systems is how the different agents within the system should interact and co-operate. Working on simple models such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma gives a fundamental understanding of how to tackle these problems.â€?

Techniques for the separation and detection of nano-particles, which have the potential to identify genetic mismatches in DNA, will be honoured by the 9th Desty Award for Innovation in Separation Science this Wednesday (20 October) at the Royal Institution.The award, which will be presented to this year’s winner Professor Hywel Morgan from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, recognises real innovation in the area of separation science and chromatography, a science which uses a broad range of physical methods to separate and analyse complex mixtures. After receiving his award, Professor Morgan will present a lecture on his latest research in separation science. He will describe how he uses alternating current electric fields to manipulate and separate biological particles, how these fields are generated inside micro-chips made using micro and nano-lithographic techniques, and how this technology can be used to identify and separate cells, bacteria, viruses, DNA and even molecules. Professor Morgan said: ‘It is a great honour to receive the 9th Desty Award and to have an opportunity to describe my research in this field. We have made huge advances in the use of electric fields for the separation and detection of particles within bio chips and our work has many applications in separation science and in other fields. We hope one day to be able to use this technology to identify and sort beads covered with specific fragments of DNA, so that we can identify genetic mistakes and screen for potential diseases.’ The award presentation and lecture at the Royal Institution in London will form part of a one-day meeting (10.30am-4.30pm) of the world leaders in chromatography.

Surfing the Web could become a much more effective experience thanks to new approaches endorsed at this year’s ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Hypertext Conference. In its current state, the commonly used link in a Web page allows people to search the Web and to use hyperlinks to jump from one page to another. The down side is that when people click links, pages load on top of one another and unless they can recall the route taken, it is easy to lose much of the content of the search along the way. For their comparison of new models, called Hyperstructures, for representing information on the Web, dr monica schraefel from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and Michael Mc Guffin from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto received an ACM SigWeb Special Research Distinction, Awarded for Excellent Presentation of Theoretical Concepts. Their paper describes hyperstructures including zzstructures (developed by ECS Visiting Professor Ted Nelson) and mSpaces (developed by schraefel), in terms of graph theory. Hyperstructures allow hypertext information like the Web to be presented in ways that show not just the links between pages, but the multiple relationships between the information in the pages. For instance, one view of a group of musicians might show how they are all from a particular country; another might show how they all create a particular style of music, or all had their first performance before they were six. The formalizing of hyperstructures into well-known graph-theoretic terms allowed the authors to make specific comparisons between zzstructures and mSpaces in particular. No such comparison, either formally or conceptually, between these hyperstructure approaches had been previously described. The aim of creating both the formal descriptions and the resulting comparisons was to provide a clear means for designers to compare the attributes of these hyperstructures so that they could decide which approaches best suited their information design requirements. dr schraefel comments: ‘By considering new models for representing information which go beyond generic organizing structures like the lists we see from a Google search, we can consider equally new approaches for representing hypermedia information spaces that let us explore the relationships among the information, rather than just the data in a page. Relationships within information let us develop different kinds of knowledge about something. We hope that our comparisons of how we can represent these relationships will act as the basis for designers to be able to make informed design decisions about the attributes they might want to use from these structures if they want to design richer information spaces than what the Web currently allows.’

A new middleware package which will take grid computing out of research laboratories and into industry will be pre-released on Monday 25 October. The middleware is the first to be released by the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII), whose mission is to become the UK source for reliable, open-source Grid Middleware. The OMII was launched earlier this year and is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. OMII is a £6.5m project funded by the UK e-science programme and led by Professor Peter Henderson and Professor David De Roure. Grid Middleware is already being manufactured and promoted by several organisations, but according to Dr Alistair Dunlop, Director of OMII, greater emphasis needs to be placed on useability of these systems with a low entry cost to organisations. ‘Customers have made significant investments in tooling and standards and they want to use these existing tools to develop standard-compliant web services,’ he said. OMII has taken the middleware that exists on the market and refined the codes so that it is packaged in a way that meets users’ needs. The OMII Grid infrastructure does this by providing a number of common services, such as security and accounting, which are available to all deployed applications and which as a result benefit from a consistent security policy. Dr Dunlop said: ‘This is good news for collaborative science. OMII has invested a significant amount of time and effort on improving the ease with which the grids can be established and managed. This is an area which has befallen grids of the past. OMII’s emphasis is a major shift in taking Grid computing out of research labs and into industry.’ A public pre-release of the new software will take place on 25 October, followed by full release on 6 December 2004.

A new anti-spam device, which could put an end to email scam 'phishing' frauds, was launched on 1 November. The term 'phishing' describes the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. This year, UK bank customers have been targeted by a new wave of 'phishing' frauds. The fraudsters send emails claiming to be from banks and credit card companies, which invite customers to access what appears to be a genuine and legitimate financial services home page and update their details. Customers are asked to log on by keying in their details, including access codes and passwords; in many cases this has led to their accounts being emptied. Now, to combat this fraud, Julian Field, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, has developed a new and effective device. Julian is lead developer of MailScanner, which is already the world's most widely used anti-spam computer security system. Julian's new device searches for web links in email messages and compares the address provided with the actual organisation's address. If the two do not match, MailScanner places a large red message in the email by the link, alerting users to the warning and flagging the real location of the website as well as the bogus version. Julian comments: 'These attacks are proving highly effective at stealing people's credit card numbers, PIN numbers and just about any other confidential personal information the thieves want. The copy of the bank's website is an extremely good imitation and quite good enough to fool 99.9 per cent of people into thinking that it is the real thing. Our device, the first of its kind, will alert people and hopefully stamp out this crime. It needs no frequent updates and will identify these attacks before they hit anyone's mailbox.'

Professor David Payne FRS, CBE, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, will be awarded the Kelvin Medal, one of science's most prestigious honours, at a ceremony at the Institution of Civil Engineers, on Tuesday 2 November.

The award follows the presentation to Professor Payne last week of the CBE from HM The Queen at Buckingham Palace, for services to photonics.

Previous winners of the Kelvin Medal include radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi and Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine.

A leading international expert in photonics and optical fibre technology, Professor Payne has spearheaded many key advances in optical-fibre communications, including the development of the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, which has revolutionised telecommunications over the past thirty years.

Professor Payne is Chairman and Director of Southampton Photonics Inc, an international spin-out company from the University of Southampton which manufactures several of his inventions. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Optical Society of America and the Royal Society of Arts. This year he celebrates his fortieth year at the University of Southampton, which he joined as an undergraduate in 1964.

He commented: 'This honours not just me, but all the hundreds of world-class photonics scientists with whom I have had the privilege to work over the years and who have made the ORC the internationally recognized centre it is today. I am looking forward to many more years of innovation in this exciting field.'

Professor John Burland, Chairman of the Institution of Civil Engineers awards committee added: 'Professor Payne's research into photonics, and its application to produce many of the key advances in optic fibre communications over the past 30 years, has made an outstanding contribution to the application of science to engineering. This exceptional work makes him a very worthy winner of the Kelvin Medal for 2004.'

The brilliant dazzle of butterflies’ wings could hold the key to a new type of optical material, called photonic crystals. Over the past 15 years, photonic crystals have attracted the attention of a vast international community, as scientists have begun to realise their potential applications in the field of optoelectronics and telecommunications. According to Dr Luca Plattner, who undertook research in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, our understanding of the way that light is reflected from the wings of butterflies could lead to the fabrication of new photonic crystals. Dr Plattner investigated the optical properties of a periodic nanostructure found on the wings of a tropical butterfly, Morpho rhetenor. Several decades of scientific investigation had shown that understanding the source of the butterfly’s dazzling blue coloration required the use of the most advanced techniques employed in optical engineering. Dr Plattner’s study explored the remarkable properties of the nanostructures and the physical mechanisms that produce them, both experimentally through optical measurements which complemented those reported by other scientists, and theoretically via cutting-edge simulation techniques developed for photonics. This enabled him to fabricate optical structures inspired by the butterfly microstructure using silicon-based materials and processes that are common in microelectronics. The work was carried out under the supervision of Professor Greg Parker. ‘The reason for studying the structure on the wings of that particular butterfly was that it has strong similarities to the photonic crystals already fabricated in the ECS Microelectronics Research Group,’ said Luca Plattner. ‘I was able to explore a biomimetic process, one in which we can learn new lessons from nature which are beneficial to both engineers and entomologists.’ Dr Plattner’s work will be published in the first print issue of the Royal Society’s Interface magazine, due out on 22 November.