Regenesis is the scientific term that describes the natural renewal that takes place after a forest fire. Appropriately, the term has been chosen to describe the recovery process that has begun in the School of Electronics and Computer Science after the fire that engulfed our Mountbatten Building in October. Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School, was woken in New York to be told of the fire - read her blog of the first week. And add your own words or pictures! Planning has begun for a new modular ECS 'village' to be sited next to Zepler Building and to be ready by late January. The new buildng for Computer Science is on schedule and staff from Zepler will move into it in 2006. The Regenesis project will be launched officially next spring to provide a focus for a range of activities that will accompany the provision of new buildings and facilities for the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The new head of a University of Southampton group which derives its inspiration from nature plans to make it the leading group of its kind in Europe.

Professor Dave Cliff, who joined the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) this month, is to lead the new Science and Engineering of Natural Systems group (SENSe) which will develop ECS research into the science and engineering of computational methods. His aim is to further an understanding of biological and other natural systems, and to undertake research into the development and application of novel computational tools and techniques that are inspired by natural systems.

Professor Cliff spent his early career in academia, initially at the University of Sussex and then MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, and in 1998 moved to industry where he worked most recently as a director in Deutsche Bank's FX Complex Risk Group.

Professor Cliff's early research was in computational neuroscience/neuroethology, studying visual control of gaze and flight in airborne insects and using artificial evolution to automate the design of autonomous robots. In 1996, while working as a consultant for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he invented the seminal 'ZIP' trading algorithm, one of the first of the current generation of autonomous adaptive algorithmic trading systems which began his involvement in working on automating trading processes for the world financial markets.

He is now returning to academia because he believes that this is where the real challenges lie.

He commented: 'Having spent seven years as an academic and then seven as an industrial researcher, I now think that many of the most exciting opportunities lie in academia.'

Through SENSe, Professor Cliff aims to develop ECS's capability so that it becomes the leading group in Europe, if not the world, in naturally-inspired computing techniques. He plans to do this through developing its learning and teaching capabilities and its research collaborations with industry.

He commented: 'ECS at Southampton is the best place in Europe for this kind of work. We are already leaders in our field in terms of our unique combination of skills. It is difficult to think of any other comparable groups anywhere in terms of skills and expertise.'

This month's edition of the prestigious Spectrum journal, published by the IEEE, features an in-depth report on the GLACSWEB project, directed by Dr Kirk Martinez of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, in association with Dr Jane Hart of the University's School of Geography. GLACSWEB is monitoring sediment movement in the Briksdalsbreen Glacier, in Norway, using a series of wireless probes inserted deep into the ice. The research project has been running for five years and has gathered valuable data about the response of the glacier to climate change. Briksdalsbreen is Europe's largest glacier. The article was written by Erico Guizzo, who spent a week with the team during one of their six-monthly visits to the glacier.

Start any institutional repository (IR) with EPrints, recommends Professor Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania (UTas), Australia. In a paper presented to institutions in New Zealand, Sale reports on the widely-used software packages for building IRs, favouring EPrints because of speed of set-up, ease of use, and minimal costs for running and maintaining a server. "It just works. No fuss. No maintenance. It's just too easy", Sale remarked in correspondence.

Although others advocate more complex ICT-based approaches to creating an IR, Sale warns that this will involve more significant manpower costs, and may be unjustifiable. "Can people fly flags and ring bells over conquering Everest when it turns out to be Highgate Hill?"

It is better to get up and running in a week or two, Sale argues, noting that: "All of the OAI-compliant software has the ability to do bulk transfers of the databases, should you wish to change in the future."

Not that such a scenario is likely. EPrints, the original IR software in 2000, has an active and growing developer team, and with its recently launched Services (http://www.eprints.org/services/) and Community (http://www.eprints.org/community/) support is ready to respond quickly to the needs of users.

Sale is not a passive observer of IR developments. Having been responsible for setting up the University of Tasmania's EPrints-based IR, he has written software add-ons, available for download, to provide authors with feedback on the usage of their papers in the IR.

A project which will provide a means of tracing the origins of computer-generated information, has received a seal of approval from industry. Professor Luc Moreau from the School of Electronics & Computer Science and John Ibbotson from IBM UK Ltd have showcased the initial results of the EU Provenance Project to IT analysts with very favourable results. The two-year project, which borrows its name from the trusted, documented history of works of art, aims to extend this concept to the computer science industry.

Richard Veryard, management consultant and technology analyst from CBDI Forum, commented on the fact that current audit trails are “all over the placeâ€? and that provenance is an important aspect of governance and an area which needs an analysis and design methodology.

In an article on IT-Analysis.com, Peter Abrahams from Bloor Research recommends that the Architecture for Provenance Systems which was recently published by the project should be read by anyone developing architectures or solutions for compliance processes.

Professor Moreau commented: ‘Now just 12 months into the EU Provenance Project, we have developed architecture for the project and a methodology guide for its use. Within the next 12 months, we will deliver a standardisation proposal for the industry to use.’

Other partners in the Provenance team are: Cardiff University (Welsh eScience center), German Aerospace Center (DLR), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Registration for the 15th annual World Wide Web Conference 2006 has been opened by the University of Southampton's Professor Wendy Hall. The four-day event, to be held in the UK for the first time, will take place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre between 23 and 26 May 2006. It is expected to attract 1500 to 2000 delegates and will bring together key players from the international community.

'WWW2006 will be the meeting ground for the brightest minds and the broadest thinkers to discuss, debate and set the future direction of the World Wide Web,' said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, the conference organisers. 'Attendance will be vital for anyone wanting to keep ahead of emerging technologies and innovation on the web.' The conference programme will feature papers on world-leading technical innovations in the mobile web; building and using large-scale web infrastructure; web-based software and information engineering; web ethics and the challenges of security and privacy. Invited speakers will explore the implications and applications of web technology for government, society and business through a series of individual presentations, panel discussions and questions from the floor.

'The conference has a growing reputation for its outstanding technical quality,' said Dr Les Carr, one of the WWW2006 co-chairs. 'We have invited speakers who will address the wider issues that adopting web technology causes society, and that means providing high-level sessions for information and media professionals, technology consultants, social commentators and political advisors.'

Day one, Tuesday 23 May, is entitled Business Success and has a strong commercial focus. It will reflect on the impact of web-based innovation on the world of e-commerce and more traditional business models. The New Wave, Wednesday 24 May, investigates the next wave of capability for the web, the semantic and pervasive web, and how these will transform society over the next decade.

On Thursday 25 May the conference tackles the international impact of the web on global issues in science, education and security. The final day of the conference, Friday 26 May, scrutinises Society and the Web and the repercussions of the web on health. Areas of discussion will include web-based support for healthcare professionals, patients' confidentiality, terrorism, democracy, child protection and fraud.

Conference attendees will include a blend of key influencers such as CIOs, IT directors and decision makers from the public and private sector and researchers, technologists and developers from institutions and technology-driven businesses.

The conference registration opens with a limited number of tickets available at reduced rates. The special offer Early Bird Passport allows attendance to every event in the four-day conference calendar and covers all tracks and all public social events. The tickets cost £700 (students £400) and will be sold on a first come, first served basis.

An ambitious five-year research programme is aiming to find solutions for some of the most complex and challenging problems that we currently face.

Disaster recovery, particularly the restoration and maintenance of decentralised data and information systems, has been chosen as the real-world application for the ALADDIN project, which comprises a team of experts led by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

'Typically the response to complex incidents, such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack, involves highly uncertain and dynamic environments,' said Professor Jennings, 'in which information exhibits ambiguity, imprecision, and bias, and is held by multiple stakeholders with different aims and objectives. Resources are often limited, and resource levels can vary.

'Our aim in this programme is to develop techniques, methods and architectures to build decentralised information systems that can operate effectively in these extremely difficult circumstances.'

The £5.5m ALADDIN programme is one of a number of programmes that bring leading academic groups to key industrial challenges through the BAE Systems/EPSRC Strategic Partnership, with the objective of delivering high-quality research and enhancing industrial capabilities.

The ALADDIN team comprises internationally-leading researchers in complex adaptive systems from the Universities of Southampton, Bristol and Imperial College; in fusion, inference and learning from the University of Oxford and Imperial; and in decentralised architectures from BAE Systems.

Professor John Murphy, Head of University Partnerships, BAE Systems, said: 'To have competitive products and capabilities for future global markets we need to initiate the research now, with the best academics. Its success will depend on how well we excel at transferring the knowledge into the company. ALADDIN, directed for BAE Systems by Dr Robert Johnson from our Integrated System Technologies business, has wide relevance across our company.'

The researchers will focus on autonomous reactive and proactive components of information systems-known as 'agents', which can sense, act, and interact in order to achieve individual and collective aims.

'These agents need to be effective in such challenging environments,' said Professor Jennings. 'They need to be able to make best use of the information available, to be flexible and agile in their decision making, cognizant of the fact that there are other agents in the system, and adaptive to their changing environment.'

Amongst the challenges facing the researchers is to bring together work from a number of hitherto distinct fields, such as information fusion, inference, decision-making, and machine-learning. This work then needs to be combined with work from multi-agent systems, game theory, mechanism design and mathematical modelling of collective behaviour in order to give a collective view on behaviour.

'As ever more information sources become available-through the Web, intranets, and so on-the problem of obtaining and fusing the right information when making decisions and taking actions is becoming increasingly pressing,' said Professor Jennings.

Ironically, Professor Jennings found himself at the centre of a major fire in the School of Electronics and Computer Science in late October. Not only did the fire devastate research facilities in the School, its effects put the School's servers out of action, losing all communication with the outside world through web and email. The restoration of network systems then took five days to achieve. 'The fire has certainly hardened my belief about the importance of the domain and the need to ensure that disparate organisations with their own aims and objectives are well co-ordinated,' he said.

(ALADDIN stands for Autonomous Learning Agents in Decentralized Data and Information Networks)

Computer scientists are developing Virtual Research Environments which should lead to a better understanding of stem cells behaviour.

Dr Gary Wills and Dr Yee-Wai Sim at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton are working on the Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to develop Virtual Research Environments (VRE) for orthopaedic surgeons.

CORE is developing a VRE to aid surgeons and biomedical researchers in conducting clinical trials and preparing findings for publication. The aim is for VRE users to utilise the rapidly expanding computing and storage capabilities of federated computing Grids to run data analyses and simulations, in order to understand how stem cells develop in bone and other skeletal tissues.

Dr Wills commented: ‘No one knows what triggers stem cells to develop bone. By using Grid simulations, we can begin to understand the whole process, from the level of the cells’ own programming right through to the growth and repair of living tissue in patients.’

Simon Grange, an orthopaedic surgeon involved in the work, said that the chance to model the genetic origins of disease with the clinical manifestations will provide new insights into how conditions as varied as growth disorders and osteoporotic fractures covering the full spectrum of ages will be treated in future.

‘We aim to achieve the next quantum leap forward in science benefiting from the knowledge gained from the Human Genome Project,’ he said. ‘This computing resource should open completely new avenues, starting from understanding the disease processes, to finding cost effective treatments.’

The CORE will also involve the development of computer-based models which use the Semantic Web, Grid and Internet to allow clinicians across the UK to share and reuse knowledge to improve health care. It will use new software from OMII (the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute based at the University of Southampton) which will make possible large-scale modelling and simulations processes.

Dr Yee-Wai Sim commented: ‘No one has ever done work like this with orthopaedic surgeons. In fact, computer science has never done anything on such a scale either. We see it as a major breakthrough. The new software will make the whole process much easier for scientists and non-scientists alike to use.’

The project will run until October 2006 and a VRE demonstrator is planned to be available by mid-December this year.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Deputy Director of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, has been awarded a Fellowship by the Optical Society of America (OSA). The OSA is the premier international learned society for scientists working in optics and photonics, and is behind the top academic journals and conferences in this field.

Professor Rutt, who is also Deputy Director of the University’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, and an Electronics graduate of the University of Southampton, received his Fellowship ‘for pioneering contributions to infrared science and technology including the discovery and development of new optically pumped molecular gas lasers.'

OSA Fellowships 2006 have also been awarded to Professors Anne Tropper and Jeremy Baumberg from the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Professor Andy Clarkson from the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

'These awards recognise the outstanding achievements of these four new Fellows in their diverse areas in optical research and their potential for future discovery,' commented Professor Joe Hammond, Dean of the University's Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics. 'The fact that these awards cover three University schools demonstrates the collaborative and multidisciplinary approach needed when moving forward in photonics.'