Computer science students at ECS have spent the last semester working on a project to help Southampton International Airport manage the many obstacles that might infringe on flight paths around the runway. The Airport needs to keep track of thousands of permanent obstacles such as buildings, motorway signs, lights, and trees, that might affect the safety of flight paths. Since standard industry systems are large and expensive, aimed at major airports, ECS students on the second-year Software Engineering Group Project were set the task of developing solutions. The results of all the group projects were presented to John Hamshare, Airside Compliance and Planning Manager at Southampton International Airport, and Chris Thomas of IBM UK’s Hursley Research Lab, which donated the Thinkpads to the ECS students. ‘The students have impressed me very much with their understanding of the problems associated with evaluating priority “obstaclesâ€?, and the quality of their products is outstanding,’ said John Hamshare. ‘Each group provided special features, all of which I found useful and interesting. ‘I have used an earlier version of the product to help me with safeguarding issues and expect to make use of it for some time’, he added. The winners, photographed with John Hamshare and Chris Thomas, were: Anthony Ambrus; Donna Belsey; Paul Brown; and Sze Lee, and they will now go forward to the Thinkpad Challenge finals in September. The students were led by the Course Team--Mike Poppleton, Bob Walters and Martin Szomszor.

A lively new website for schools, launched this week, focuses on telecommunications, providing a complete overview of the subject, capturing its excitement, and highlighting its many exciting opportunities.

The new M2M (Morse code to Multiplexing) website aims to brief students on everything they need to know for the telecommunications part of the GCSE examinations in Physics, Balanced Science and Applied Science and A-level Physics.

M2M has been produced by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Public Engagement in Science programme.

Dr Averil Macdonald, Co-ordinator of the M2M project commented: 'The telecommunications section of the school syllabus covers real cutting-edge science and often it's so new that few school textbooks cover the topic well. We are providing a complete overview of the subject for the students and their teachers. But we are also going further to show just how exciting this area of research is and how many opportunities there are in this field.'

The website, www.m2m.ecs.soton.ac.uk , includes revision guides, frequently asked questions and answers, quizzes for students to test themselves and exam tips. Students will be able to learn essential facts about optical fibres, telecommunications and lasers through animations that show how things work instead of relying on wordy explanations. Students can also take an interactive virtual tour of a laboratory where optical fibres are made.

The website simplifies the highly technical world of telecommunications by presenting key facts in an interesting and entertaining way, for example, it states that one strand of fibre is thinner than a human hair but 10 times stronger than steel of the same length and diameter; that light travels so fast in a fibre that it can go to New Zealand and back in 0.1 second and that one square inch of optical fibre could lift 216 six-tonne elephants.

There is also information about student life, how to find the right university course, and what it's like to be working at the cutting edge of science.

M2M was prepared by Professor James Wilkinson, Dr Alun Vaughan, and Dr Dan Hewak.

A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional repository.

The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'.

The new results are being reported this week at the International Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement.

The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296 respondents. The main findings are:

* The vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would comply willingly with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply (highest willingness, US: 88 per cent; UK: 83 per cent; lowest, China: 58 per cent).

* 49 per cent of respondents had already self-archived at least one article in the previous three years

* 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of self-archiving

* Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest rate of self-archiving in the UK

* Only 20 per cent of authors who self-archived reported any degree of difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9 per cent with subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent papers.

* Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the most papers

* Researchers' primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited)

In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print archive which has over 300,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv, did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed encouraged it.

'These results are hugely important,' said Stevan Harnad, 'and will be highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly self-archive if they were asked to do so.

'Universities and research-funders who have hesitated about requiring this now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'

On the critical question of whether the optimal route for self-archiving is the central one (as favoured by the US National Institutes of Health) or the distributed institutional model (favoured by the UK), Professor Harnad says that the JISC/Key Perspectives reports provide strong support for the UK Parliamentary Select Committee, which specifically proposed distributed institutional self-archiving. This is now likely to form the basis of a recommendation from Research Councils UK (RCUK), which has been considering the future of Open Access to UK-funded research output.

In the first project of its kind, school students will have the chance to design compounds with anti-malarial potential.

The University's Schools of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Chemistry,in conjunction with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Reading, have set up the Schools Malaria Project website (http://emalaria.soton.ac.uk) which hosts a web-based browser interface similar to that used by drug companies. Students are invited to register for admission to the site where they will learn more about the disease. They will also be able to research approaches to combating it and develop new molecules with anti-malarial potential.

Students will be using real drug-design tools and will be guided through the various stages of the drug-design process, right from their initial sketches of molecules to docking of the structure into the proposed active site to establish if it is a good 'fit'. They will also be able to consult with other students and university researchers and compare their progress with other schools through a group-scoring table.

Dr Jeremy Frey of the University's School of Chemistry comments: 'This type of exercise has never been made available to school students before. We believe that there is a very real chance that some of the compounds that they come up with will be made.'

This e-science project, which will be launched in September to sixth form colleges in Hampshire, is designed to increase young people's interest in science and the material is aligned with the A-level Chemistry syllabus. Dr Frey added: 'We need to change the poor impression young people have of science and this is widely recognised as essential for the future of the UK science and technology base. We have chosen to focus initially on just the pre- and post-GCSE group, with a longer term aim to carry this further down the educational system and similarly to widen it out to the general public.'

The Schools Malaria Project is funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing programme.

Sensor technologies geared towards understanding glacier dynamics and floodplains were exhibited at The Royal Academy of Engineering Annual Soirée and exhibition on Monday 27 June.

The GLACSWEB and FloodNet projects, which were both developed by scientists at the University of Southampton's Schools of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) and Geography, demonstrate advances in pervasive computing and illustrate how networks of wireless sensor probes can be used to measure environmental conditions.

In the case of GLACSWEB, a network of probes have been installed in the sedimentary base of Europe's largest glacier at Briksdalsbreen in Norway so that the team could learn more about climate change through recording glacier behaviour.

The FloodNet project, which has completed its first phase, involved installing a wireless sensor network at specific points around a stretch of river in Essex. The sensor nodes collected information about the local environment which was fed back to the University of Southampton so that it could be used to model flood simulations to provide early warning of the threat of flooding.

Professor David De Roure, ECS's expert in Pervasive Computing, commented: 'We are very proud to be able to showcase these two projects based on pervasive computing. This is just the beginning. Pervasive computing devices provide an exciting opportunity for intelligent sensing of the natural environment.

'Continued improvements in technology will mean smaller, lower power and lower cost devices,' he added. 'Recent research has created novel methods for harvesting energy from the environment to provide self-powered microsystems, giving a glimpse of the degree of pervasiveness the future may hold.'

The GLACSWEB and FloodNeT projects are based in the Centre for Pervasive Computing in the Environment in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and funded by the DTI Next Wave Technologies and Markets Programme.

It was announced last week that four members of the School had been awarded Personal Chairs. In addition to the four new appointments: Professor Sheng Chen, Professor Paul Lewis, Professor Manfred Oper, and Professor Mark Zwolinski, Dr Hugh Davis, Head of the Learning Technologies Group in the School, has been appointed as University Director of Education.

Professor Sheng Chen is a member of the Communications Group. His research interests include adaptive signal processing for communications, modelling and identification of nonlinear systems, learning theory and neural networks, finite-precision digital controller design, evolutionary computation methods and optimization.

Professor Paul Lewis is a member of the Intelligence, Agents Multimedia Group. His research centres on the broad area of multimedia knowledge management; in particular, problems in image and video processing and analysis, multimedia annotation and semantic description of media.

Professor Manfred Opper of the Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems Group researches complex adaptive systems, using ideas and techniques of Statistical Physics which allow systems to be studied with many degrees of freedom. In recent years he has applied these ideas to the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for probabilistic data models in Machine Learning.

Professor Mark Zwolinski of the Electronics Systems Design Group has research interests including the design of robust digital systems and modelling of mixed-signal systems. His book Digital Design with VHDL has been translated into Chinese and appeared in many different editions. He is also co-author of a book on Circuit Simulation.

Dr Hugh Davis takes on the new role of University Director of Education. He is Head of the Learning Technologies Group in the School, and was previously Director of Learning and Teaching for the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. His research interests are in learning technology, and the ways in which technology can improve the learning experience, and his current focus is on the use of web and grid services to build an e-Learning Framework.

An e-Science project which is helping chemists to analyse and store the massive quantity of data being produced by modern combinatorial techniques, has been awarded additional funding of £415,000 by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

CombeChem is one of the most ambitious uses of Semantic Web and Grid computing. Led by the School of Chemistry, the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) at the University of Southampton, the project will facilitate the measurement, storage and reuse of information on thousands of chemical compounds.

Current storage and processing systems in chemistry laboratories are overwhelmed by new techniques that produce chemistry data on thousands of compounds, in the time taken to synthesize and measure just one compound in the past.

For effective investigation and identification of new active materials, drugs and catalysts, it is essential this information is gathered and stored logically so that it can be retrieved for later analysis, reused in future experiments, and automatically related to other information.

Dr Jeremy Frey from the School of Chemistry commented: 'CombeChem's success will ultimately impact on the design of materials through the prediction of their properties and the identification of suitable compounds in a variety of applications. It will also allow chemical information to be registered on the web and avoid chemists having to reinvent the wheel.'

The School of Chemistry is an ideal e-Science test bed to exploit the data in a Grid-based environment. The team is creating a smart lab which uses Grid computing to facilitate co-operative interactions between groups of chemists and other users.

This lab will have digital Tablet PCs instead of paper lab-books so that research information is made instantly available, as demonstrated by the Smart Tea project (http://ww.smarttea.org/). It will apply distributed computing networks to allow the team to compile a large database of molecules, have Comberobots to scan the database, and applications to carry out multiple simulations to understand the potential interaction between molecules.

Professor David De Roure of the School of Electronics and Computer Science commented: 'Through CombeChem we have built a very significant Semantic Grid resource, providing an exciting glimpse of the future infrastructure for research. This is a tremendous platform for innovation both in chemistry research and in computer science.'

The final phase will be completed within four years. Additional funding, building on the base provided by the EPSRC Platform grant, is being sought with current interest from the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sector

An ECS researcher whose PhD results have already been patented by the University has been awarded a prestigious five-year research fellowship.

Dr Huda Abdel Wahab Abdel Rahim El Mubarek of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton has been awarded a prestigious five-year research fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) jointly with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This is the first time that this award has been made to a female member of the University.

During her fellowship Dr El Mubarek will be researching novel methods of dopant diffusion suppression in semiconductors. This is a further development of the doctoral research which she completed in Southampton in 2004 with Professor Peter Ashburn, in which she has shown that a properly optimised fluorine implant is able to completely suppress boron transient enhanced diffusion in silicon and silicon-germanium and significantly reduce boron thermal diffusion. These important results have been patented by the University of Southampton and will now be commercially exploited by Innos Limited.

Dr El Mubarek came to Southampton from Sudan in 1996 as an undergraduate student, drawn by the reputation of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. In 1999 she graduated top of the first class honours category in her degree cohort in Electronic Engineering and won numerous prizes for her achievements, including the Dean's Award for Best Performance throughout her degree.

'I'm delighted to have received the RAEng/EPSRC Fellowship,' she said, 'and I am looking forward to the exciting opportunity which it will give me to continue with my research here for the next five years.'

'Southampton is simply the best place for me to undertake this research,' she added, 'because of the facilities in the University and the Innos cleanroom and the team. It's a very friendly environment and I am very happy to be here.'

Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK’s national academy for the promotion of engineering and technology.

Professor Jennings is Deputy Head of School (Research) and Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group. He is Chief Scientific Officer of Lost Wax and Director of the newly established BAE Systems/EPSRC Strategic Partnership in Distributed Data and Information Systems.

‘I am proud to receive this honour from the Royal Academy of Engineering,’ he said, ‘which I feel also reflects the achievements of the many research collaborators and students I have worked with in recent years.’

Professor Jennings is one of the world’s leading experts on agent-based computing. He helped pioneer the application of multi-agent technology; and developed some of the first real-world systems. This focus led him into the areas of agent-based software engineering and the Semantic Grid. More recently, his focus has been on automated bargaining, auctions, markets, mechanism design, coalition formation, decentralised control, and trust and reputation.

He has received a number of distinguished academic awards, including: the Computers and Thought Award in 1999, an IEE Achievement Medal in 2000, and the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2003. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the European artificial intelligence association (ECCAI), and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC). He has published over 275 articles and 6 books on various facets of agent-based computing and holds 3 patents.

At the age of 38, Professor Jennings is the second youngest Fellow in the Academy.

Professor Wendy Hall has become the first female Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and plans to work with the Academy to attract more women to the discipline.

According to Professor Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, who was elected at the AGM of the Academy on Wednesday 6 July, there is a pressing need for more women engineers--not only to achieve a more healthy gender balance in the industry but because society needs their input in design so that products can be used satisfactorily by both sexes.

Professor Hall, who has been a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2000, will succeed Sir Duncan Michael and will hold the post for three years. As well as developing her own role as Senior Vice President she will deputise for Academy President Lord Broers when required.

She plans to develop initiatives to influence public perceptions of engineering and to build on the impetus created by Lord Broers' Reith Lectures on The Triumph of Technology to communicate the significance of engineering to wider audiences. She also plans to encourage more interdisciplinary working across engineering and orchestrate campaigns to encourage more women into engineering.

She commented: 'I am very proud to be an engineer and to have been appointed to this post which puts me in an excellent position to improve public perceptions of engineering so that more young men and women are encouraged to join the discipline.

'Women, in particular, need to be represented in every aspect of industry; otherwise products get designed purely from the male perspective. This might not matter so much with the design of a bridge, but take, for example, a car. Volvo recently put an all-female team together to see what difference their perspective made to the design of a car. We need to encourage more engineering companies to encourage the active involvement of women in all aspects of their business.'

For further information contact Joyce Lewis: 023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk