David Swaffield, research assistant in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory has been awarded the 2005) Eric.O.Forster Young Scientist Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE. David received his award at the IEEE International Conference on Dielectric Liquids at Coimbra, from Robert Hebner, President of the IEEE’s Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS). It was based on a paper entitled “Partial discharge characterisation in liquid nitrogen composite systemsâ€? by D J Swaffield, P L Lewin, Y Tian, G Chen and S G Swingler. David has recently completed a doctoral thesis on the future use of liquid nitrogen as an electrical insulation for superconducting power apparatus under the supervision of Dr Paul Lewin and Dr George Chen. The Electrical Power Engineering Research Group in ECS has a long established reputation for its research into the potential application of high temperature superconductivity (HTS) to power plant. David’s research was funded by the EPSRC and concerned design issues relating to the development of terminations for a HTS high voltage cable. ‘Where Liquid Nitrogen is used both for electrical insulation as well as temperature control, it is important that its electrical properties are well understood because this will inevitably lead to optimised designs of future HTS high voltage plant’ said Dr Lewin. David has measured partial discharge activity in liquid nitrogen and for the first time has obtained images that relate to the actual discharge event. Based on David’s publications in this area he has also been invited to be a panellist, representing the UK cryogenic dielectric research community, at the First Cryodielectrics Workshop to be held as part of the IEEE 2005 Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Performance

The UK is losing around £1.5 billion annually in the potential impact of its scientific research expenditure, according to one of the key figures in the global open access publishing movement. Professor Stevan Harnad, Moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has calculated the potential return on the investment in scientific research findings that are being lost to the UK each year through the limitations of the current academic publishing environment.

'Research Councils UK (RCUK) spends £3.5 billion of Government money annually funding British science,' says Harnad. 'This results in around 130,000 articles published each year in research journals, but the publication alone does not reflect the return on the UK's investment.

'Research, if it has any value, must not only be published, but used, applied, and built upon by other researchers,' he continues. 'This "research impact" can be measured by the number of times an article is cited by other articles - the more accurate way to regard it is as a "citation impact".'

In an article published today ('Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment Research', http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11220), Harnad calculates the value of the citation impacts that are being lost to the UK each year by the inaccessibility of many research papers. 'A published article is accessible only to those researchers who happen to be at institutions that can afford to subscribe to the particular journal in which it was published,' he says. 'Today, the online age has made it possible for

authors to self-archive their publications by placing them on their own institutional website, thereby providing free access to the research to everyone who is interested.'

Harnad has been one of the most vocal and persuasive advocates of open access provision over many years, and he has recently seen widespread acceptance of his recommendations. He vigorously supports the proposal from RCUK that would require UK researchers to deposit (on their institutional website) the text of any journal article resulting from RCUK-funded research.

He reveals today that the calculations of the value of research impact to be gained by a universal policy of self-archiving indicates a figure of at least £1.5 billion's worth annually. 'This is actually a conservative estimate,' says Harnad. 'It also takes no account of the much wider loss in revenue from potential usage and applications of UK research findings in the UK and worldwide, nor the still more general loss to the progress of human inquiry.'

He is calling for a full acceptance of the RCUK recommendation. 'We know that 90 per cent of journals already endorse author self-archiving,' he says, 'and that over 90 per cent of authors will comply.

'This is a historic moment for the UK to set an example for the world,' he concludes, 'showing how to maximize the return on public investment in research in the online era.'

A new sensor is being developed for the aerospace industry which will also have applications in medicine and the automotive industry. The sensor could be cheaper and more effective than others on the market.

Engineers from the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton and Brunel University have been commissioned by Ellison Sensors International, based in Wales, to design a sensor to measure pressures in jet engines.

Research into traditional methods of pressure measurement, which use a foil gauge bonded into a diaphragm, revealed that factors such as temperature and age of the device can impair the accuracy of the measurement.

The new sensor, which is based on resonant sensing, replaces the foil track with a resonant sensing element. This is excited into resonance using screen-printed smart piezoelectric materials and offers significant improvements in measurement over traditional methods.

Andrew Frood, a PhD student at ECS commented: 'The applications of this sensor are both varied and exciting, ranging from sensors small enough to be inserted in a patient's blood stream giving a continuous readout of their blood pressure, to a sensor capable of monitoring the high pressures in a jet engine. The low cost of production could also open up new areas of mass deployment of the sensors bringing safety benefits such as cheap tyre pressure monitoring through sensors embedded in the tyres.'

Albert Ellison, Managing Director of Ellison Sensors International added: 'We are very excited about this pressure sensor which will work well in high temperature environments such as the aerospace industry. It will be the first sensor on the market capable of measuring a full range of pressures which will also make it suitable for a wide variety of applications.'

A prototype of the sensor is due to be available in six months' time with the final product available in 2007.

Scientists at the University of Southampton are developing a new framework which will facilitate more accurate probabilistic weather forecasting.

Over the years, many different techniques have been used in weather forecasting, from relatively simple observations of the sky to highly complex mathematical models run on the world's largest computers. Despite significant advances in this field, due to the unpredictability of the weather, forecasting remains a complex business.

Scientists are working towards a solution. Professor Manfred Opper from the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) has started work with Aston University, the University of Surrey and the Met Office to develop new methods to improve probabilistic weather prediction.

The researchers are starting their work with the assumption that all models have errors and that they will therefore need to adopt a probabilistic framework which will allow them to characterise not just the typical behaviour but also the uncertainty that results from model error and other sources. This approach will set them apart from most other environmental models which are essentially based on a deterministic view of the world.

Their first task will be to produce a computationally efficient algorithm that can propagate the uncertainty in the model state through space and time. Unlike many other approaches to quantifying uncertainty they will exploit the known physics when this is available, and be able to estimate unknown or imperfectly known model parameters from observations to augment this. Their methods will be tested on a range of simplified models which exhibit the same behaviour as weather forecast models, but have a controlled number of degrees of freedom.

Professor Opper commented: 'The need for probabilistic models is becoming increasingly recognised in the academic and research community across environmental science, but it is yet to make a strong showing in the more operational setting of commercial weather forecasting. Our work will enable a more principled and accurate approach to probabilistic forecasting to be considered.'

Dr Dan Cornford from Aston University added: 'We expect that the result of this research project will be a new framework for conducting probabilistic modelling for environmental systems, which will allow us to make more accurate probabilistic forecasts. We hope that this will bring improved weather and climate forecasts in the future, but it clearly also has applications beyond these areas.'

In a move to make scientific research more freely available, the University of Southampton is running a training course this week for those planning to set up institutional repositories.

The University, one of the key players in the global Open Access movement, has launched EPrints Services, to provide a range of advice, support, and practical help to all those planning to set up, or maintaining, an institutional research repository.

This unique service is being launched this week with a five-day course from 26 to 30 September. This training will be repeated in the UK in December, and a similar event will also be run in Bulgaria. Further information is available at http://www.eprints.org/services/

The University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science leads the world in open access, software to support it, and its applications.

Its software, called EPrints, is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world. The EPrints software is open source and free and can be downloaded from the EPrints site.

'The launch of EPrints Services is particularly timely,' said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. 'In the UK, the Research Councils (RCUK) have announced that all research council-funded research must henceforth be placed in an institutional repository. Around the world, the success of the open access movement is ensuring that academics and universities want or, increasingly, are required, to make their research universally accessible to the wider community.

'EPrints provides the original solution for institutional repositories,' he continues. 'Now our wide-ranging experience and expertise gained over the years is being channelled into EPrints Services to ensure that new repositories are constructed to suit their institutions, and with appropriate policy and support systems designed as part of the package.'

Dr Carr points out that the advantages of having an institutional repository extend beyond research accessibility: 'We know that IRs increase citations and impact, and can therefore add powerful weight to research status and grant applications,' he said. 'They also enable data-sharing and enhance research opportunities, as well as accelerating the research cycle.'

'But every institution is unique,' he adds, 'and EPrints Services will ensure that these special features can be translated into a repository that best mirrors the institution.'

A roadmap which suggests how agent-based computing could develop over the next decade will be launched this month.

The Agentlink III Roadmap, which has been compiled by Professor Michael Luck at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will be launched at ATC, the Agent Technology Conference in Stockholm, on Tuesday 18 October 2005.

The document was developed as a result of an extensive 18-month consultation with experts in agent technology, including the 192 members of Agentlink III and experts in the Americas, Japan and Australasia.

The ultimate aim of this initiative is to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in agent technology. AgentLink's role is to promote research, development and deployment of autonomous, problem-solving computational entities across industry and academia.

The document describes current research initiatives and deployment of agent technologies and presents the challenges ahead posed by new Grid computing and web technologies.

Professor Luck commented: 'This strategic technology roadmap is not intended as a prediction of the future. Instead, it is a reasoned analysis of the recent past and current state of agent technologies which has allowed us to present one possible development path for the technology.

'By doing this, we aim to identify the challenges and obstacles that will need to be overcome for progress to be made in research and development and for greater commercial adoption of the technology to occur.'

A copy of the AgentLink III Roadmap can be accessed at www.agentlink.org/roadmap.

A workshop which will bring together the world’s top researchers in pattern analysis will take place this week.

The Analysis of Patterns workshop, which will take place at the Centre “Ettore Majoranaâ€? for Scientific Culture in Erice, Italy from 28 October to 6 November 2005, will enable the world’s scientific communities committed to developing common principles of modern pattern analysis to come together and share their experiences.

A number of lectures and presentations on the theme of pattern analysis and related developments will be given by eminent academics. Among those speaking are: Gregory Chaitin, IBM T J Watson Research Centre, Esko Ukkonen, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Dan Gusfield, University of California, Davis and Alberto Apostolico, University of Padova and Georgia Institute of Technology.

According to Professor John Shawe-Taylor of ECS, together with Professor Nello Cristianini and Professor Raffaele Cerulli one of the three workshop organisers, pattern detection and discovery is at the centre of many disciplines, ranging from classical statistics to modern artificial intelligence, including bioinformatics, web analysis and much more.

He commented: ‘Pattern analysis can be applied to many different fields. For example, we could consider analysing the patterns in the brain which form when people are listening to different musical expressions so that we can see which musical patterns create different effects from pleasure to angst.’

The fact that researchers from different disciplines have been working on pattern analysis for 30 years, has given rise to several separate communities working independently on related topics.

The workshop will provide them with an opportunity to develop a unified conceptual understanding of pattern analysis, recognition and matching, machine learning systems, data mining, statistics and a range of sub-disciplines.

Around 120 graduates of the School attended a reception on Tuesday 22 November at the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Savoy Place, The Strand, London. The earliest graduate there was Howard Llewelyn, who graduated from University College Southampton (as it then was) in 1948, but all decades since then were represented, with some graduates flying from India, Switzerland, and Germany. To be added to the School's database of graduates, contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk