New research in the School of Electronics and Computer Science which could lead to the development of cheaper, more reliable portable devices has just received funding.

The project, which aims to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in devices such as mobile phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants) and digital cameras, has been awarded £250,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The research is led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi with Professor Mark Zwolinski from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) in conjunction with ARM UK: Architecture for the Digital World, Cambridge.

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, the incompatibilities between the existing techniques for testing the design of low-power embedded computing systems are making the development of such products an expensive process.

He commented: 'Embedded computing systems are often over-designed to allow designers to decrease development time through the reuse of the hardware over several product generations. This means that such systems will experience slack times where a reduced system performance can be tolerated and lower power can be achieved. Our project addresses this issue by developing fault tolerance and testing techniques that are compatible with low power, thus enabling cost-effective design and manufacturing of low-power electronic systems with improved reliability.'

The project, which begins in March 2006 and will run for two years, will address two main themes of research. By the end of the first theme, the researchers plan to have developed fault tolerant techniques that are capable of improving the reliability of low-power systems; by the end of the second, they plan to have developed further fault models and validated them through extensive simulation and an industry case study.

Professor Al-Hashimi concluded: 'This research will benefit industrial companies involved in the design and manufacture of low-power embedded cores, particularly for wireless communications and portable systems. To remain ahead of the field, it is important for companies to continually develop and improve their products, with a drive towards increased reliability and functionality.'

Innos, the UK’s leading research and development company for innovations in nanoscale technology, and the Nanoscale Systems Integration Group (NSI), today revealed how it is possible to accurately pattern silicon wafers using e-beam direct write, with accuracies of a few tens of nanometres. The Supergen consortium EPSRC funded project is the first fabrication process to be completed by Innos, since signing an agreement with Philips to have full access to its MiPlaza facility in Eindhoven, following the Southampton fire on 30 October 2005.

The project has been completed by Innos for Dr Darren Bagnall and his team from the NSI, based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. The project development work for biomimetic optical nanostructures attempts to mimic the nanostructured arrays seen on the cornea of certain night-flying moths.

Dr Bagnall explains: 'By using this type of nanostructure, we hope to create silicon surfaces that do not reflect light which would be very important for applications such as solar cells.'

Sales and Marketing Director at Innos, Alec Reader comments from the Innos head office in Southampton: 'It is testament to the team here at Innos that we have been able to seamlessly transfer activity to the MiPlaza facility and are completing processes so soon after the fire.'

Each year final year students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations, undertake a Software Management Exercise, working in teams to manage a virtual software development project. The teams aim to deliver high-quality items on time and within budget, and the winning team achieves the best compromises on cost, timescale, and quality. This year’s results were the best ever, and the victorious team was ‘Industrial Revolutions’, composed of Sam Thompson, Glen Dunnel, Emmanuel Machobane and Ian Bremner, all Part III MEng Computer Engineers. Andrew Brusby, on the third year of his course in Computer Science with Image and Multimedia Systems, gained a record Quality rating of 92.7 in the exercise. Prizes of booktokens were donated by O’Reilly Publishers. Pictured (l-r): Ian Bremner, Emmanuel Machobane, Andrew Brusby, Paul André, and Paul Catton.

A new MSc course in Web Technology is one of two new courses launched by ECS to run from October 2006. The new Web Technology course covers the current and emerging technologies being used to support web-based software systems. Also launched this year, the new Complexity Science MSc addresses the critical challenges facing the computational and biological sciences, by focusing on the underlying principles of complexity common to both. The MSc in Web Technology provides the opportunity to study markup languages such as HTML and XML, their applications in e-business and web services, and related topics such as security, cryptography, intelligent agents, interaction design, and distributed computing systems, taught by leading experts in these areas. The MSc Complexity Science places emphasis on two complementary objectives. Students on the course will learn how to use advanced techniques to understand the robust, adaptive and self-organising properties of biological and natural systems, and also how to exploit these properties to address the pressing problems presented by the increasing scale and connectivity of today's engineeered systems. Both courses are intensive high-level, research-led programmes that last for one year, and involve a mixture of taught components as well as a 13-week research project and dissertation.

A group of second-year undergraduate students from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, working with sixth-formers at Peter Symonds College, Winchester (PSC), make up one of only three UK teams to be taking part in the high-profile FIRST annual robotics competition, based in the United States.

The team has just begun the six-week build period to design their robot for the Toronto regional competitive event, which will be held on 30 March and 1 April.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) attracts around 1000 entries each year. The competition emphasises engineering, teamwork and collaboration between teams who have only six weeks to design and build their robot for a task that changes each year. This year’s challenge involves large 50kg robots autonomously shooting basketballs through hoops to score points.

The ECS students, Justyn Butler, Robert Spanton, Jeffrey Gough, and Howard Buck, formed the robotics group at PSC last October, and have been mentoring the sixth-formers since then, visiting the College each week. The group is working on a robotics kit for teaching engineering through practical experience.

‘We’re developing a versatile system of modules that stack together,’ said Justyn Butler, ‘so that a broad range of robots can be developed from one set of parts. This system allows new modules to be added easily and we have many ideas for new functionality.’

The system is suitable for people with any level of technical ability, and according to Justyn, a simple robot can be built with no background knowledge, while more adventurous students are free to develop their own ideas.

Not only are the team building their robot kits, and FIRST robot but they are also fundraising hard, with a target of £19000 to meet the cost of the entry fee, materials, tools, and transport for the team to take part in Toronto.

Adrian Pelling, Physics teacher at PSC, is enthusiastic about the project: ‘This is a great opportunity for students to deal with real-life problem solving,’ he said. ‘It’s all about being a good team, and our college students have had to show great resourcefulness and initiative in order to attempt this challenge.’

He is equally enthusiastic about the Southampton students’ involvement: ‘Our student mentors have been fantastic,’ he said. ‘Their technical knowledge and skill is impressive as is their ability to communicate with and motivate the team.’

For the students and sixth-formers the lists of tasks to be accomplished by the competition encompasses not just the design, build, programming and testing of the robots, but also raising sponsorship, organizing events, preparing publicity, meeting with company representatives, shipping the robot to Toronto, booking flights, ordering parts, organizing accommodation … an endless list, that still has to be carried out despite other pressing study commitments.

But as Adrian Pelling notes: ‘Education should be so much more than passing exams. The FIRST challenge develops a wide range of skills in our students that they and their future employers will find invaluable.’

ECS at the University of Southampton is offering four short courses and a two-day workshop on topics in Complexity Science this spring. The first of these five events starts on Wednesday 29th March and the last finishes on April 12th. Participants can attend the entire 15 day intensive school or may attend one or more individual events.

These new courses are designed for postgraduate students (perhaps early in their PhD studies or on masters courses) and industrial employees wishing to learn about the principles and challenges of complexity in natural and engineered systems. The courses are designed to addresses the critical challenges currently facing the computational and engineering industries by focusing on the underlying principles of complexity in common with biological systems.

Emphasis is placed on two complementary objectives. Participants will learn how to use advanced techniques to understand the robust, adaptive and self-organising properties of biological and natural systems, and also how to exploit these properties to address the pressing problems presented by the increasing scale and connectivity of today's engineered systems. The course focuses on developing core mathematical modelling and simulation skills, providing a firm knowledge base in relevant biology, and command of established techniques in biologically inspired computing.

The courses are sponsored by the EPSRC and PASCAL and a limited number of places on all courses are available *free to students* who do not have their own sources of funding. This includes on-campus accommodation, breakfast and lunch. The fee for industrial participants is TBA. (Travel and evening meals are not included.)

The School of Electronics and Computer Science is a leading partner in a European research project which will build trust and validation into distributed computer networks. The EU Provenance project will enable users of Grids—networks of computers at distributed locations–to understand the process by which a particular result was generated. This is fundamental to many real-life applications in science, engineering, medicine, and supply chain management. Indeed, without such reliable background information, users cannot reproduce, analyse or validate processes or experiments. Provenance will provide a documented history for information generated and managed within a Grid infrastructure. This means that the information, especially the results of processes or modifications, can be inspected, validated and reasoned about by authorised users who need to be sure that information controls have not been altered or abused. ‘Ultimately we are building trust, proof and validation into Grids,’ says Steve Munroe, EU Provenance Exploitation Manager in ECS, ‘enabling users to have the highest levels of confidence in the information available. ‘Grids operate by dynamically creating services at opportunistic moments to satisfy the needs of a particular user,’ he explains. ‘These services may belong to different stakeholders operating under various different policies about information sharing. It’s therefore crucially important that the results generated by such a composition of services can be trusted by the user. But when the services disband, how can we verify the processes that contributed to the final result?’ As an example, he points to organ transplant management, which must obey a variety of regulations imposed by different governing bodies. ‘Provenance can be used to determine that a given process has adhered to the necessary regulations,’ says Munroe, ‘thus enabling the end user to place trust in the results received.’ Provenance has already produced a first public version of software requirements for the provenance architecture, covering both the logical and process architectures of provenance systems. The process architecture developed by the project is generic, in the sense that a core set of functionality that any industrial strength provenance architecture should have has been identified and designed. Translating this to a real-world instance, such as aerospace engineering or organ transplant management, then involves implementing the logical architecture, as well as extensive interactions with experts to integrate the system with target domain applications. The EU Provenance project partners 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 the Computer and Automation Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; the EU Provenance Project Architect is Professor Luc Moreau of ECS. ‘We also are developing a methodology that will facilitate the development of provenance-aware systems in other domains,’ adds Munroe, ‘and we aim to develop preliminary standardisation proposals for provenance systems to submit to the relevant standardisation bodies.’

A new Professor in the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is working towards making global computing a dependable reality.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, previously Head of the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, has joined ECS to help raise the School's profile and promote its external visibility in theoretical computer science.

After completing his MSc and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Professor Sassone worked for a range of industrial and academic organisations, including Hewlett-Packard, and the universities of Aarhus (Denmark), Catania (Italy) and Queen Mary, University of London, where he developed operational and denotational models for mobile, distributed systems.

During his career, he developed an interest in the foundations of computation, with a particular interest in global ubiquitous computing and in how theoretical results can impact on practice and the industry at large.

He believes that the infrastructure will soon exist for global computing, but is not just about weaving sensors and processors into fabrics, or positioning RFID tags and ad hoc networking everywhere: it requires an in-depth understanding and a substantial furthering of the foundations of computer science.

He commented: 'We are moving towards seamless computing or, what is increasingly known as, global ubiquitous computing, which means that we will have information available everywhere which can be processed cheaply and at high speed by a multitude of diverse computing devices. My interest is not in just making the technology happen, but in making sure that we have the right foundational tools and that we understand the systems we deploy.'

Professor Sassone joined ECS because he believed that it would provide more opportunities for him to apply his foundation perspectives to applied research. He believes that as his understanding of the underpinning theories increases, he will be able to find synergies with applied research and mount joint attacks to the ubiquitous computing 'grand' challenge.

This year’s Multimedia Systems Conference was voted a great success, not just by the student participants and their lecturers, but also by the event’s sponsors, Motorola Automotive.

The annual conference forms a major part of the School’s final-year Computer Science course in Multimedia Systems. Students have the ambitious task of organizing and running a day-long conference, which showcases their own research findings in the form of presented papers. The whole process is as much as possible like an authentic conference, with individual research project posters, anonymous peer review, and a full day of presentations.

Out of 46 submissions to the conference this year, 16 were selected for presentation in four tracks: Multimedia Networking, Multimedia Storage and Retrieval, Content Creation and Application, and Distributed Multimedia Information Systems

Kevin Fogarty of Motorola Automotive gave the keynote presentation. ‘The whole event was a great success,’ he said, ‘with a high standard of posters and presentations. The topics chosen were very much in line with Motorola’s vision of “seamless mobilityâ€?.’

This year’s event was held at The Avenue Campus, and attracted a large audience. Prizes for best poster and best presentation went, respectively, to Emma Lee Choon and Miran Baric. The organizing committee was chaired by Josephine Ekman and Heather Packer; and the Multimedia Systems course co-ordinator is Dr David Millard.

Last year Dr Millard, along with Dr Mark Weal, Dr Hugh Davis and Su White, received a Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Award for the Multimedia Systems course, on which the conference is an innovative feature.

A new machine to manufacture glass fibres which will be the best in the world could speed up the way messages are communicated through the Internet. Glass fibres with tiny holes through them have many uses, even manipulating light to enable messages to find their own way through the Internet. The new machine involves very complex mechanical components using jet-engine alloys, highly specialised construction techniques, and a special understanding of how to manipulate glass.

The University has already played a major role in the development of technology which led to the Internet. This new research could make communication on the Internet even faster.

The machine will be developed by Professor Harvey Rutt, Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), Professor David Richardson, also a Deputy Director of ORC, and co-investigator, Ken Frampton, head of the ECS mechanical workshop. They have just received a grant of £85,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

This new research into ‘The Ultimate Soft Glass Extrusion Machine’ (TUSGEM), has been awarded as a result of earlier work by the team and others at the ORC on using soft glasses to develop the Holey Fibres (HF) in 1995, which enabled glass to be extruded and fibres to be made which contain tiny holes. Their work since then has led them to look for new processing and fabrication techniques for glass fibres.

Professor Rutt commented: ‘This is an exciting development which could revolutionise manufacture of these astonishingly versatile fibres. Ken Frampton has done extensive work on researching the properties of glass and began by using FIMO (children’s modelling clay) to construct dummy fibre preforms which looked like giant coloured beads of toothpaste! His inventive approach to building the machine has been crucial.’

Ken Frampton explained: ‘Although the clay doesn’t behave exactly like glass, it allowed us to look at how the glass could be heated and squidged out through the holes, and how it flows through the machine. The challenge is working with multiple holes. Our new machine will provide a much more accurate way of squeezing the material.’