A meeting of international institutions which have signed up to Open Access (OA) could result in a united policy creating a huge growth in free access to research findings. The Berlin 3 Open Access Meeting: Progress in Implementing the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities will be hosted by the University of Southampton on Monday 28 February and Tuesday 1 March. The purpose of this meeting, which will include representatives from Europe, the US, India and Pakistan, is to implement the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which has now been signed by 55 major international research institutes since its launch in Berlin in October 2003, an initiative widely hailed at the time as world-leading. University of Southampton Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement, comments: 'The Berlin Declaration itself was only an abstract expression of the principle that scholarly and scientific research should be free online to all potential users worldwide. We now need to implement the Declaration so as to make it a practical policy which institutions that have signed can commit to adopting.' During the two-day event, representatives from some of the world's most prestigious research institutions, including France's CNRS and Germany's Max-Planck Institute, will present their experience of implementing the Berlin Declaration in their organizations. The University of Southampton will be proposing a Unified Open Access Provision Policy, as a practical way to implement the Berlin OA Declaration based on the successful approach it has recently adopted and announced. It will suggest that universities and research institutions worldwide should adopt a policy that all of their published research journal articles (whether in OA or non-OA journals) are deposited - immediately and permanently - in their own institutional OA Archives, freely accessible to all potential users worldwide (rather than just to those whose institutions can afford the access-tolls of the non-OA journals). The meeting will conclude with a discussion on implementation of the latest Berlin roadmap and a call to new organizations to sign the Declaration.

A new student branch of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has been established in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The new student branch will be launched by a seminar given by Professor Lajos Hanzo, himself a Fellow of the IEEE, on Wireless Media Communications. The seminar takes place on Tuesday 1 March at 5.30 pm in Zepler Building, Seminar Room 1. The new IEEE Student Branch at ECS is one of more than 1000 branches worldwide, and 15 in the UK. The Student Branch is planning to organize a full range of activities to benefit ECS students, including regular seminars and social events, and to provide news of the latest recruitment opportunities. Professor Hanzo is Head of the Communications group in ECS, which is recognized as world-leading in its research into mobile communications. Professor Hanzo's talk, 'Wireless Multimedia Communications: A tele-presence paradism for anyone, anywhere, anytime, or the dawn of the world wide wait?' will be given on Tuesday 1 March, at 5.30 pm in Seminar Room 1, Zepler Building, and refreshments will be available. All students in ECS are welcome.

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’

Southampton, Hampshire, UK – March 9th, 2005 – The latest of Microsoft’s Gen ’05 student technology roadshows comes to town at the University of Southampton on Wednesday March 9th. With hundreds of students expected to attend from colleges and universities across Hampshire, the roadshow gives students interested in technology the opportunity to see a multitude of new products and technologies in action and to find out how their interest can contribute to an exciting career, whatever their professional ambitions.

Open between 1000hrs and 1730hrs at the University of Southampton’s West Refectory, West Building, this interactive event will include hands on demonstrations of different technologies and devices including Microsoft® mobile, gaming and developer tools and technologies, a series of presentations and the chance to speak with Microsoft staff about their experiences of working for different areas of the company. Students attending will also have the chance to win prizes including a limited edition Crystal Xbox® and a Windows® Media Center.

Caroline Phillips of Microsoft’s Academia team said “The Gen ’05 tour is a key component of the Microsoft Academic Initiative and gives students a chance to see what Microsoft and technology are all about, as well as see how technology is going to be a big part of their personal lives and careers, whatever they do. Technology has a huge role to play in helping people realise their full potential, and this is even more important during their education.â€?

Eric Cooke, School Senior Tutor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, said, “I would like to say to all students – your career will be greatly affected by the technologies presented and discussed at Gen '05. It is an exciting event at which you will get to see the latest business and gaming technologies and discuss them with people from Microsoft and the University of Southampton. This is a fun opportunity for you to think about how technology will get into every aspect of your life: professional, personal and creative. Turn up and join in!â€?

Sarah Deane, a Microsoft Student Partner and student at the University of Southampton, added "Gen '05 gives students from all academic backgrounds the chance to see cutting edge technology and talk with Microsoft and University representatives about why it is important to their career. It's a fun and interesting day, with lots of chances to play with the latest and best technology, as well as opportunities to ask the Microsoft team questions.�

Professor Wendy Hall visited China last month to conclude an agreement with the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), which will now be sending up to 20 students each year on the new MSc in Software Engineering in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The President of BUPT is Professor Jintong Lin, who is himself a graduate of ECS, having undertaken his doctoral research in the School in electronic engineering. Professor Lin was recently voted China’s leading University President, and in honour of this and his leadership of BUPT, Professor Hall presented him with a certificate naming him as a Distinguished Alumnus of ECS.

‘It was a great pleasure to visit Professor Lin at BUPT’, said Wendy Hall. ‘He is an extremely loyal alumni of the School and very proud of the time he spent at Southampton. We now look forward to welcoming BUPT students to our MSc programme and increasing our links with this very prestigious Chinese university.’

Professor Hall visited Beijing as part of the University delegation led by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bill Wakeham, who signed the formal agreement with BUPT on behalf of the University of Southampton.

Dr Kieron O'Hara, Senior Research Fellow in ECS, has written a book which will be of particular interest to the UK's political parties as a general election looms on the horizon. Dr O'Hara, a computer scientist who works on the AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration, has taken his expertise in knowledge management for organisations and looked at how it might apply to a government, a country, or a political party. He comments: ‘We have seen in organisations, for example in the NHS, how a lack of information can lead to poorly conceived decisions with unanticipated effects. I wondered if the same was true in the wider world. Perhaps our lack of understanding of complex, dynamic societies should lead to careful conservatism.’ The end result is his book, After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher, published this month by Icon Books, in which he embarks on a quest for an ideological answer to the Conservatives’ difficulties. He begins by redefining conservatism as a philosophy of knowledge, then on that basis he describes an effective Conservative manifesto which, he believes, would need to be much more liberal than current Tory policies, and lastly, he explores the extent to which the current party is still influenced by Thatcherite principles and how such allegiances block any real inclinations towards change. He concludes: ‘Most of the senior figures in the Conservative party reached political maturity under Thatcher. I am saying that they need to go beyond Thatcher and create a post-Thatcher, post-Blair Tory party.’ After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher is Dr O’Hara’s third book; his previous books: Plato and the Internet, and Trust: From Socrates to Spin also focused on knowledge and society.

A workshop which will investigate the learning power of machines and report advances in this field will be hosted by the University of Southampton from 11 to 13 April 2005. According to Professor John Shawe-Taylor from the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and organiser of the event, machine learning first became popular in the 1960s, but there has been a resurgence of interest in the last 10 years due to the quality of the new algorithms available. The range of problems that can now be solved using the approach has increased very significantly. Professor Shawe-Taylor showed last year how the complex and individual performance styles of concert pianists such as Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz could be modelled in unique ‘performance alphabets’, providing a method of recognizing their performance styles by computer, and also, possibly, reconstructing them. Now at the Southampton Challenges Workshop, PASCAL – Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computation Learning, further examples of machine learning will be demonstrated as the results are presented of four challenge projects set over the last year. The best relevant contributions will be presented from challenges such as asking the machine to recognise and categorise objects; and to decide, given two text fragments whether the meaning of one text can be inferred from another. There will also be feedback on the current situation concerning machine-learning algorithms for information extraction from documents. Professor Shawe-Taylor commented: ‘PASCAL seeks to generate challenges and those who attend the workshop can expect to see state-of-the art machine learning and to get an impression of what these advances can do for them.’

In an initiative that will be of great value to electronics students, Philips Semiconductors Southampton have provided a set of hardware development tools to the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The equipment will be used by undergraduate students in project work. ‘This is a very generous donation to our students,’ said Tim Forcer, who runs the School’s Electronics Teaching Labs. ‘It will extend the range of work that can be undertaken in our labs, and offer new opportunities for development projects.’

Simon Quin, Software Systems Specialist from Philips Semiconductors, visited ECS to hand over the equipment: ‘As an engineer I can tell you that there is no substitute for using the real tools. Philips is keen to encourage students and help broaden and deepen their learning opportunities.’

MEng Computer Engineering student Nick Dance is especially grateful for the donation: ‘I’m building a Secure HTTP server that runs independently of the host computer over USB,’ he said. ‘The microcontroller it uses to run the web server and SSL layer is an 8051 clone for which Philips have donated eight In-Circuit Emulation (ICE) units with fully-integrated Keil C compilers. The ICE equipment will be used primarily for debugging and hardware testing although it can be used to replace the processor altogether if the hardware is unavailable. I will use the compiler to program all the software for the system.

Dr Denis Nicole, Reader in the School’s Declarative Systems and Software Engineering research group, also intends making use of the equipment in his Real Time Computing and Embedded Systems course. ‘The 8051 is a very versatile microprocessor. These high-quality development tools will give our students valuable experience, adding to their portfolio of transferable skills.’

Pictured are (l-r) Dr Denis Nicole, Tim Forcer, Simon Quin, and Nick Dance (seated) viewing applications of the new equipment in the School's Electronics Labs.

New middleware from the OMII (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute) is released today (Monday 21 March) with the latest version of OMII_1.2. For the first time OMII_1 is available for Redhat Enterprise Linux. OMII is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. This latest release follows the successful public launch of OMII_1.0 in December 2004 and continues the OMII mission to become the UK source for reliable, open-source Grid Middleware. The OMII was launched in 2004. It is a £6.5m project, funded by the UK e-science programme and led by Professor Peter Henderson and Professor David De Roure OMII_1.2.0 has been extensively tested and is now available to the community. This release offers increased platform support, improved performance, easier installation, easier testing and improved functionality. The OMII provides an open source grid infrastructure that addresses user requirements of combining usability within a secure environment. The Institute believe that emphasis on usability and a low entry cost is the key to enabling collaborative e-science. OMII has taken the middleware that exists on the market and refined the code 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 accounting and data, within a secure environment, available to all deployed applications, and which as a result benefit from a consistent security policy. Users can develop their own web services, making use of the common services, and hosted by the OMII secure infrastructure. OMII_1 is a professional grid infrastructure to support collaborative computing in a secure and accountable manner. It addresses the needs of service and resource providers by providing a detailed accounting model linked to the authorisation system. It addresses the needs of users by providing secure yet easy access to resources and services. It addresses the needs of administrators by providing a simple to install and manage infrastructure without the usual security worries.

The Brochure includes an introduction by Professor Nick Jennings, Deputy Head of School (Research), in which he says: 'One of the keynotes of our success has been the constant evolution of our research in response to opportunities created by new technology and new methods. 'We continue to form new research groupings, for example BIO@ECS, and Grid and Pervasive Computing, to ensure that we remain at the forefront. 'One of our major strengths is the ability to combine research expertise across the School. We also work closely with many networks of researchers in universities and business. Among our research collaborators are some of the world's leading companies and agencies, and we recognize that it is through such partnerships that the greatest advances will be made.'