Tony Hey, Professor of Computation at the University of Southampton and a senior member of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a CBE in the New Year's Honours List.

Professor Hey, who is currently on secondment from the School as Director of the UK's e-Science Programme, was honoured for his services to science.

A former Head of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science and Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Southampton, Tony Hey is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

He has worked in the field of parallel and distributed computing since the early 1980s. He was instrumental in the development of the MPI message-passing standard and in the Genesis Distributed Memory Parallel Benchmark suite. In 1991, he founded the Southampton Parallel Applications Centre, which has played a leading technology transfer role in Europe and the UK in collaborative industrial projects. His personal research interests are concerned with performance engineering for Grid applications but he also retains an interest in experimental explorations of quantum computing and quantum information theory.

As the Director of the UK e-Science Programme, Tony Hey is currently excited by the vision of the increasingly global scientific collaborations being enabled by the development of the next generation 'Grid' middleware. The successful development of the Grid will have profound implications for industry and he is much involved with industry in the move towards OpenSource/OpenStandard Grid software.

Tony Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He is the author of two popular science books: The Quantum Universe and Einstein's Mirror. Most recently he edited the Feynman Lectures on Computation for publication, and a companion volume entitled Feynman and Computation.

Open Access to scientific and academic research publications is one of the hottest topics currently engaging academic and knowledge managers, publishers, and libraries. The University of Southampton has considerable experience and expertise in making its academic research freely available online, and is now offering that experience to other UK institutions in the form of two free one-day workshops, being held in Southampton at the end of this month (Open Access Institutional Repositories: Leadership, Direction and Launch). The first workshop, aimed at archive administrators and those offering technical support for institutional repositories, will take place on Tuesday 25 January and will provide hands-on practical sessions on building and configuring repositories. The second workshop, geared towards pro-vice chancellors, senior librarians, repository managers and researchers, will take place the next day, Wednesday 26 January. This high-profile event will feature speakers from key players such as Research Councils UK (RCUK), the British Library, the Wellcome Trust, and other influential UK policy developers. The day will end with a research colloquium on Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years, led by Professor Stevan Harnad, regarded as the founder of the Open Access movement, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the world's leading experts in knowledge management technologies. The University of Southampton announced last month that it is to make all of its academic and scientific output freely available and that it is transitioning its own repository from the status of an experiment to an integral part of the research infrastructure of the institution. '2005 is poised to be a breakthrough year for Open Access,' said Dr Leslie Carr, Technical Director of the open source GNU EPrints software initiative, 'particularly for institutional repositories in the UK. At Southampton we have a significant head start since we created the EPrints software that is used by many UK universities. These workshops are intended to pave the way for other institutions who will inevitably be establishing their own open source archives. 'We are providing these events free of charge in order that as many people as possible can attend, and also in the collegial spirit of the open source community. This is a subject which all institutions need to know about and to plan for, and we are anticipating a high level of interest.' The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting Academic Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been investigating the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional repositories.

There is currently no standard means of proving the source of computer-generated information. There is therefore no way of auditing the information or tracing how a particular result was achieved. However, a new EU-wide project will provide a means of tracing the origins of computer-generated information, as well as creating a standard for the industry. The EU Provenance Project, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme, borrows its name from the trusted, documented history of works of art, and aims to extend this concept to the computer science industry. According to Professor Luc Moreau of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, the Provenance project aims to provide mechanisms and standard industry software which will allow information generated and managed within a grid infrastructure to be proven and trusted. This information will be documented in such a way that it can be inspected and validated by authorised users who can also ensure that it has not been tampered with during the process. 'This will be a very important service for organizations in the aerospace and organ transplant industries, in particular, said Professor Moreau. 'It will also have applications in the travel industry and could be very useful in tracing the source of spam.' Partners in the Provenance team are: School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton; IBM UK Ltd; Cardiff University (Welsh eScience Centre); Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft - und Raumfahrt s.V, Universitat Politechica de Catalunya; and Computer and Automation Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The need for a nationwide policy to ensure that UK researchers and their universities derive the benefits of providing Open Access (OA) to their research will be examined next week at a two-day workshop on institutional self-archiving at the University of Southampton.

During the event, Open Access Institutional Repositories: Leadership Direction and Launch, academics from the University of Southampton will share their experience and expertise in making scholarly and scientific research freely available online. They will be joined by research funders and other universities and institutions to discuss the way forward to 100 per cent OA in the UK.

The first day (Tuesday 25 January) takes the form of a hands-on tutorial on creating and using Institutional OA Repositories. Many universities will be represented at this event, which will enable them to benefit from the experience already gained at Southampton.

The second day (Wednesday 26 January), will be an all-day symposium opened by Robert Campbell, President of Blackwell Publishing. He will consider how author self-archiving of journal articles might affect learned society journals, and reflect on the balance between providing OA to articles and protecting the journals that publish them.

Other speakers include:

*Bill Hubbard of Nottingham University, who will describe the SHERPA Directory of Publishers' policies on author self-archiving (92 per cent of journals have already given it their green light); *Stephane Goldstein of Research Councils UK and Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust will report new directions in research funders' policies on the self-archiving of funded research in institutional and central OA repositories, and *Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd. will report the results of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) surveys on author OA self-archiving practices and attitudes as well as on central versus institutional self-archiving.

The OA policies at the University of Southampton and a number of other institutions (including the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries, the British Library, and the Arts and Humanities data Service) will also be presented.

The high-profile event ends with a research colloquium - Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years - in which Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a leading expert in knowledge technology, will illustrate the potential power and benefits of institutional OA repositories in maximising and measuring research impact, productivity and progress.

There are two roads to OA: the 'golden road' of publishing in an OA journal (author-institution pays publication costs instead of user-institution) and the 'green road' of publishing in a non-OA journal but also self-archiving the article in an OA archive.

Professor Harnad comments: 'Only 5 per cent of journals are OA journals (gold) today, but over 90 per cent have a green policy on author self-archiving. However only about 15 per cent of articles have as yet been self-archived. To reach 100 per cent OA, self-archiving needs to be mandated by researchers' institutions and research funders.'

Professor Shadbolt will describe how a new generation of web technologies allows researchers to trace and analyze the connections between their publications. He says: 'Publications will be threaded in ways that allow a researcher to find related work, to understand the impact it is having, and even to detect new trends and emerging concepts in an area. Open Access and self archiving are key developments in facilitating a truly global information infrastructure.'

A team of researchers led by Dr Pier Sazio of the Optoelectronics Research Centre and Dr David Smith of Physics and Astronomy has won funding for a four year nanotechnology project under the Research Councils UK Basic Technology Research Programme. This innovation will result in structures with unique optical and electronic properties, with a number of diverse applications ranging from integrated circuits to chemical sensors. The project, which runs for four years, is a collaborative effort involving scientists from four University of Southampton departments as well as researchers in the Chemistry departments at the Universities of Nottingham and Manchester. The project involves using a new form of chemical vapour deposition to enable the right types of growth in the pores. Professor Parker designed and implemented the four low-pressure chemical vapous deposition systems housed in the Innos clean-room.

The benefits available to universities which provide Open Access (OA) to their research were highlighted at a two-day workshop on institutional self-archiving held this week at the University of Southampton. Institutions which self-archive could experience increased ease with Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) compliance, double the amount of research exposure and impact, and gain access to advanced technologies which will revolutionise the information industry, said conference speakers. The need to perform the actions necessary to make all of the UK’s institutional research Open Access by depositing it in institutional repositories was highlighted by Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement. He told the workshop that although the UK is second in the world in terms of creating institutional repositories, many of them still lie near empty. He said that issues such as negotiating publishers’ embargoes and a means of deciding on the definitive version of research work should be shelved until the UK’s archives are filled with self-archived research. He commented: ‘We should refrain from speculating about what will be the changes in journals in 10-15 years time; right now the definitive version is in the journal. What we need first is Open Access to the author’s version, and then we can worry about developments and improvements later.’ The case for mandatory action was presented by Alma Swan from Key Perspectives. She reported that 79 per cent of UK researchers in surveys funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on Open Access archiving said that if self-archiving were required by employers or research funders, they would comply willingly. She also revealed that institutions which self-archive gain twice as much impact for their research work than those which do not. The main reasons why they fail to do so are time constraints, lack of awareness of open access possibilities and inability to mount the data. The fact that systems are in place for self-archiving to go ahead was reinforced by the other speakers. Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust reported new directions in research funders’ approaches to self-archiving of funded research in institutional and central OA repositories; Bill Hubbard of Nottingham University described the SHERPA Directory of Publisher policies on author self-archiving and presented the case for institutional repositories rather than central subject-based systems, and Derek Law from the Scottish Confederation of University & Research Libraries highlighted the role of the RAE in the creation of institutional repositories in Scotland. The link between Open Access and the RAE was highlighted again in the closing research colloquium -- Research Repositories: The Next 10 Years – when Professor Harnad and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a leading expert in knowledge technology, illustrated how cite rank algorithms and semantic web technologies can be applied to Open Access systems so that performance and impact indicators can be developed.

Sir Tim was one of seven Britons who received awards in the ceremony, including author Philip Pullman, designer Sir Paul Smith, architect Lord Norman Foster, journalist Lord Bill Deedes, and fundraiser Jane Tomlinson. 'There is a real calibre of people who make our country great and proud to be British', said the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who made the opening speech. Sir Tim said: 'I have won awards for computers, but I have never won an award for being British.'

Nanoscale Systems Integration (NSI) is the new title for one of the School of Electronics and Computer Science's eight world-leading research groups. According to Head of Group, Professor Greg Parker, NSI (previously known as Microelectronics) has undergone considerable change over the years. From initial research into Silicon microelectronic devices only, the Group’s interests now encompass MEMs/NEMs, photonic crystal circuits and devices, solar cells, new materials, atom chips, 'Lab-on-a-chip' particle manipulators, nanomagnetic materials and devices, nanophotonics, and continuing work on advanced bipolar and MOS devices.

'The theme that more exactly defines our work today is fabrication and engineering at the nanometre length scale, in order to produce small integrated systems on chips,' said Professor Parker. 'The creation and characterisation of new metamaterials will form part of the overall nanoscale system engineering. We will also draw on Biomimetics--studying living systems in order to borrow evolutionary solutions to optical and mechanical problems honed by Nature for over 50 million years.'

The NSI group will work and collaborate closely with Innos, the recently created University spin-out company that now runs and maintains the Clean-Room facility.

Nanotechnologies which can artificially change the optical properties of materials to allow light to be trapped in solar cells could greatly reduce the cost of solar energy.

Research being carried out by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is focusing on nanopatterning as the way to design effective solar panels.

‘By drawing features that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, photons can be confused into doing things they normally wouldn’t do,’ says Dr Darren Bagnall, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. ‘By creating diffractive nanostructured arrays on the surface of solar cells we ensure that optical asymmetries are created that prevent light from escaping the solar cells.’

According to Dr Bagnall the light-trapping technologies could reduce the thickness of semiconductor materials needed in solar panels, and this would directly reduce the cost. The first challenge is to prove that the technology works in practice, the second key challenge will be to develop cost effective ways to produce nanopatterned layers.

The ECS approach is being applied to the £4.5M ‘Photovoltaic Materials for the 21st Century’ project which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Other university partners in this project are Durham, Bangor, Northumbria, Bath and Loughborough. They have teamed up with industrial partners to develop solar cells which will make it possible for manufacturers to slash the cost of solar energy by half.

Dr Bagnall comments: ‘We have already shown that we can use arrays of chiral nanostructures, such as swastikas, to change the polarisation of light, now we want to apply the same technology to photovoltaics.’

The brewing of tea formed a crucial component of a project which successfully took traditional paper laboratory books and moved them to digital formats. Now that knowledge and experience is being put to use in a subsequent project by University of Southampton computing researchers who are aiming to apply similar techniques to Bioinformatics.

The eScience project, which could revolutionize the way in which scientists share information, is appropriately called myTea. It has received funding of over £200,000 from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).

The researchers, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, and the University of Manchester, will draw on best practice design methods learned from other eScience projects, specifically, their own SmartTea project, which explored how paper-based information from a chemistry environment could be captured in digital forms. They will also refer to the University of Manchester’s myGrid project in order to design an integrated experiment annotation capture system for bioinformaticians.

The initial exploration of the SmartTea project involved finding common ground which would enable the practices of the scientists, as recorded in their paper lab books, to be understood by the computer researchers.

‘This was crucial for us,’ said dr monica schraefel of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton. ‘In order to help the scientists record their information digitally, we needed to be able to understand exactly how they described what they were doing in their paper lab books, and what aspects of it they recorded.’

After observing a team of chemists at work in the University labs, the researchers hit on the idea of watching the chemists make tea and record it as if it were an experiment, so that the researchers could understand exactly what was happening in the process on the bench as the scientists recorded it.

Because they knew what was happening during the tea-making, they could understand how the scientists chose to record and classify important aspects of the process, or to ignore things that were not important for the “experimentâ€?.’

‘So now, instead of writing into a lab book, scientists will write into some other type of hardware, like a tablet PC,’ said monica schraefel. ‘That data is immediately written to a server so it is stored not only locally on the computer, but on the server, and therefore immediately accessible outside the lab and to other scientific communities. ’

Armed with this experience, the researchers are now moving on to the field of Bioinformatics. Although the outcome of providing more effectively organized and accessible information is the same, the problems and processes are different.

‘In the Chemistry lab we took the “bookâ€? out of the lab to capture lab processes into digital form,’ said monica schraefel. ‘The issue here is the reverse: bioinformaticians are already all digital, and ironically, that’s the problem: they create hundreds of files spread across their hard drive for an ongoing experiment, but have no easy way to associate files with an experiment. So, this time, we need to put some of the book back into the process, to help automatically generate a lab book-like view of their work to date, which they can annotate, plug into services like myGrid, or share with colleagues.

‘This work addresses one of the central planks of the eScience project,’ she added ‘—to get data from one scientific community out to another, right away, as soon as it happens.’