Seven members of the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory from ECS led by Dr Paul Lewin recently attended the International Symposium on Electrical Insulation (ISEI 2006) held in Toronto, Canada. Approximately 180 delegates from all over the world attended, and the ECS party formed the second largest contingent. The Conference focused on developments and applications associated with all aspects of electrical insulation and power engineering in the power generation and distribution world. There were 18 oral sessions and one poster session covering diverse topics such as High Voltage cables, transformers, life assessment, partial discharges and electrical materials. Contributions were from industrial and commercial organisations as well as academic institutions. The HV laboratory contributed 8 papers out of the 136 published in the proceedings of which 6 were presented orally and 2 at the evening poster session. The real benefit from the conference was that the research students from the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory could see their work in context and also know that their work is on a level with institutions worldwide. The delegates from ECS were: Dr Paul Lewin, Dr Steve Dodd, Dr Dave Swaffield, Mark Mitchinson, Liwei Hao, Azrul Mohd-Ariffin, Dr Ian Hosier.

An ECS professor of photonics who makes major advances in optical communications by day and gazes at the stars by night, is exhibiting his collection of deep-sky images at the University Library.

Greg Parker, Professor of Photonics at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), will exhibit images of the deep sky captured over the last year from his garden observatory in the New Forest, at the Starscapes Exhibition which will open on Thursday 27 July at the University Library, Southampton.

Looking back billions of years in time and thousands of light years in space, these images of the deep sky are truly awe inspiring.

Greg’s love of the stars in the night sky led him to erect an observatory in his garden in the New Forest. Although he has been star gazing for 40 years, he only started imaging the skies last year.

‘The most amazing two and a half hours of my life (so far) was when I got Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS scope fired up so that I could automatically go to all those objects I’d only read about before’, he said.

‘I can still recall that night of Thursday 2 May 2002 as if it were yesterday. Since that time more amazing things have happened – I got a CCD camera and started deep-sky imaging. Never in my wildest dreams as an 11 year old fascinated by astronomy did I guess that I would be able to take deep-sky images from my own back garden in my lifetime!’

The camera downloads the data which Greg then processes digitally using Adobe Photoshop. This enables him to manipulate the picture and bring out the faint detail. The result is a galaxy of prints that brings the splendours of the cosmos to life.

‘That’s why it’s a great one for me,’ he said. ‘It brings together optics, the stars, photography and the computational processing. It’s got the lot in one hobby.’

Starscapes will run from 27 July to 9 September 2006. All the images in the exhibition are in the fully illustrated catalogue. [pdf]

Ends Notes for editors

1. Professor Greg Parker is Chair of Photonics at ECS. For further information about his work at ECS, his observatory and his Astrophotography, please visit the following links:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/gjp http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/news/greg_parker.php http://hometown.aol.co.uk/mobiusltd/myhomepage/photopersonal.html http://mstecker.com/pages/appparker.htm

2. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research institution with a global reputation for research and scholarship. One of the UK’s top 10 research universities, it offers first-rate opportunities and facilities for study and research across a wide range of subjects in humanities, health, science and engineering, and has a strong enterprise agenda. The University has nearly 20,000 students and 5000 staff based across its campuses in Southampton and Winchester. Its annual turnover is in the region of £287 million.

For further information, please contact:

Professor Greg Parker, ECS, Tel: 023 8059 2650, Email: gjp@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Tel: 023 8059 5453, email:j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk

The Year in Focus 2005-6 [PDF], a review of the past year in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, was published last week to coincide with the School’s graduation ceremonies. One of the most momentous years in the history of the School and of the University, The Year in Focus marks the effects of the Mountbatten fire, but also celebrates the huge amount of activity, achievement and success which has been a feature of the School’s response to and recovery from such a catastrophic event. Among the highlights of the year were the establishment of a major new research group – Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe), the 15th Annual World Wide Web Conference, organized by the School and held in Edinburgh, the award of up to 40 new Mountbatten PhD Studentships, the launch of the first video podcast news service from a UK university, and the naming of Professor Wendy Hall as one of six women who have made an outstanding contribution to UK science. Student contributions to the community, research ‘world firsts’, such as Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner’s robot controlled by living cells, and the Perpetuum vibration-harvesting microgenerator all feature in the review. Looking forward, Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School, reflects on the values of the School which have led to its success over the past 59 years, and sets the scene for the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the School, which will be celebrated throughout 2007. Copies of The Year in Focus are available from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (email enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk).

Engineers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science have developed a method to make bipolar transistors twice as fast as current devices.

Bipolar transistors are solid state semiconductor devices used in mobile phones and various wireless systems.

According to Professor Peter Ashburn who undertook this research in collaboration with STC Microelectronics, the researchers used a standard silicon bipolar technique with fluorine implants to deliver a record fT of 110 GHz which is twice as fast as the current record.

‘By using fluorine implants, the transistor can operate at a higher frequency which means it will be twice as fast as it was before,’ said Professor Ashburn.

The fluorine implants are used to suppress boron diffusion in the base of the transistor which means that the base width is narrower, allowing electrons to travel across it faster.

‘This means that the electronics industry will be able to achieve better performance at little extra cost,’ Professor Ashburn commented.

Professor Ashburn and his team believe that there is scope to reduce the boron diffusion by a further 50 per cent and they are currently monitoring how the fluorine behaves and looking at whether there are other materials that will also enable this diffusion.

‘We have already beaten the world record,’ commented Professor Ashburn. ‘We have just improved the performance of silicon to a level which was only previously possible with silicon germanium.’

A new lightweight grid is being developed to offer complete security to those who use it.

A computational grid essentially provides a mechanism whereby a collection of computers with processing capability is made available to users with computational tasks to perform.

M-grid, a teaching tool developed by academics at the University of Southampton, provides a system for building a computational grid which allows students to explore the potential of such a vast system without any concerns about security.

According to Dr Stephen Crouch at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), M-grid, which was added to the computer science curriculum last year, allows students to grasp the concepts of grid computing before they move on to a real system.

‘This service for sharing computing power and data storage over the Internet can be installed in minutes and allows students to familiarise themselves with grid technology quickly,’ said Dr Crouch. ‘Because it operates in a “sandboxâ€?, there are virtually no security risks.’

Dr Crouch and Dr Robert Walters, from the ECS Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group (DSSE), are working in collaboration with the School’s Learning Technologies Group (LTG) to develop M-grid further so that it is even more versatile and changes with the needs of the curriculum.

‘Security is a big issue in grid applications,’ said Dr Crouch, but M-grid will allow us to explore some of these issues further in a safe environment.’

Students at ECS have given their courses the highest rating in the country for the quality of their education and teaching. The results of the 2006 National Student Survey show that students in the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science gave the highest ratings in the UK to their courses in Computer Science (average 4.5 out of a possible 5), scoring aspects such as teaching, assessment and feedback, academic support, organisation and management, learning resources, personal development, and overall satisfaction. In Electronic and Electrical Engineering the Southampton students' ratings made ECS joint top along with the University of Kent. The Survey is carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and only final-year students are eligible to take part. Of the 105 eligible students taking Computer Science courses in ECS, 75 returned ratings to the Survey; and out of the 90 students eligible to return surveys in Electronic/Electrical Engineering, 65 did so. The full results of the official Survey do not provide aggregated data, however, The Guardian has published a listing of the best results across the country, which confirms the Southampton top rating for all the courses at ECS (aggregated across both 2005 and 2006 results). What makes our teaching special? To find out more, see details of all our 25 undergraduate degree programmes in our new Undergraduate Prospectus (pdf).

A partnership which will help ensure the UK's international leadership in e-Science has been launched at the country’s premiere e-Science event. The Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMII-UK) provides software and support on which the UK e-Science community and its international collaborators will be able to build a sustained future. Teams at the Universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester are putting their expertise to work with the e-Science community in order to provide advanced tools and components which will empower new research in a wide range of disciplines. This activity is a key feature of the UK's e-Science Programme, which held its annual All Hands Meeting in Nottingham last week. OMII-UK Director Dr Steven Newhouse commented: ‘OMII-UK is very much focused on the user – researchers, developers and providers – and the great thing about launching at the major UK e-Science event was that we were able to gain further insight into everyone’s projects and requirements.’ Dr Newhouse emphasised that OMII-UK provides software, support and sustainability. The OMII-UK web site provides a catalogue with information about software for e-Science, a repository for contributing and downloading software, an easy-to-install software release that provides a proven collection of software components for configurable installation, and documentation, tutorials and training. Professor Carole Goble, Chair of OMII-UK, added: ‘It is crucial that the wealth of software and know-how generated by the UK e-Science programme and our innovative Scientists is captured and made available to all. OMII-UK is the key means of doing this.’ OMII-UK gives confidence to the user community in adopting e-Science solutions through software support and training, and provides collaborative mechanisms to enable the e-Science community to help itself. It is also engaged with the international community to define, contribute and disseminate best practice and standards. This is being achieved through the engagement of OMII-UK staff in the Open Grid Forum (OGF), GIN (Grid Interoperability Now), EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science), OMII-Europe and other community activities.

Photo: (l-r)Dr Anne Trefethen,Chair of OMII-UK Board, Professor Malcolm Atkinson, e-Science Envoy and OMII-UK Edinburgh, Professor David De Roure, OMII-UK Southampton, Professor Carole Goble, OMII-UK Manchester and OMII-UK Chair, Dr Steven Newhouse, Director OMII-UK Photo credit: Tim Parkinson

Models of virtual organisations that operate within reliable and trustworthy parameters are being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.

A virtual organisation is one whose members are geographically apart (usually working via networked computer applications) while appearing to others to be a single, unified organisation with a real physical location.

According to Professor Michael Luck of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), as the market for virtual organisations grows and an increasing number of companies are represented by computerised agents acting on their behalf, there is a greater need to ensure that these agents behave responsibly.

In a project which aims to monitor the performance of the members of a virtual organization in terms of their trustworthiness, quality of service and contract compliance, Professor Luck and his team at Southampton have worked with Cardiff University, the University of Aberdeen and British Telecom on CONOISE-G (Grid-enabled Constraint-Oriented Negotiation in an Open Information Services Environment).

‘Creating and then effectively managing a virtual organisation in a dynamic environment poses significant research challenges,’ commented Professor Luck. ‘We need to draw inspiration and examples from human societies and apply them to computerised societies. Selecting different suppliers on the basis of reputation, using information from others to decide who to trust, and discounting information from unreliable sources in making judgements are all actions that need to take place in the interactions of computerized societies as much as in our normal daily lives.’

In seeking to address some of these challenges, the researchers have developed a system for the dynamic formation and operation of virtual organizations, drawing on scenarios such as that of an individual visiting London for the 2012 Olympic Games who requires a PDA to access various multimedia services.

They are currently in the process of implementing a prototype system which looks at issues such as trust and reputation, standardising communication between agents, and policing within a virtual organization, so that the impact of behaviour such as non-delivery of services by an agent is minimised.

Professor Luck commented: ‘The trustworthiness and reputation of agents are significant issues, especially in the context of virtual organizations in which the agents must rely on each other to ensure coherent and effective behaviour.

‘Only limited work has been carried out in this area so far, with the majority of developers adopting the stance of complete trust. This, however, avoids the complex issues which are crucial for the reliability and dependability of these systems and which our research aims to address directly.’

CONOISE-G is due to be completed this month.

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and one of the leading figures in UK engineering and technology, will receive the 2006 Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership at a ceremony in San Diego, California, on Thursday 5 October.

The award, which was established in 2004 in memory of the late Dr Anita Borg, honours outstanding leaders who embrace Borg’s vision to change the world for women and technology. It will be presented at the Grace Hopper Conference and Professor Hall is the first UK recipient.

Professor Hall is an acknowledged leader in intelligent information systems. Her research team developed the well-known Microcosm open hypermedia system, which was patented and spun off into a commercial company. Recently, she has joined with the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and colleagues at Southampton to develop a new research initiative in the emerging field of Web Science.

‘I am truly thrilled to be the recipient of the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership this year,’ she said. ‘It is a tremendous honour and one I shall always be proud of.’

Professor Hall is currently Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Vice-President of the US Association for Computing Machinery. She is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology and of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. She was only the second woman President of the British Computer Society (in 2003-4), and earlier this year, as Executive Chair, she successfully brought the annual World Wide Web conference to the UK for the first time. In March 2006 she was named one of six outstanding women in UK science by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology. She was awarded a CBE in 2000 and made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the same year.

From early in her career, she has been committed to attracting more women into computer science and while her efforts and roles have given her influence at the highest levels, she says there is still a long way to go to ensure that science and technology do not lose the powerful insights and skills that women can bring.

‘There is no quick fix,’ she comments. ‘Being a good role model and mentor is not enough. We need big initiatives that are sustainable over a long period of time.

‘We need to excite young people today, particularly girls, by inspiring them with visions of the wonderful careers they could have in the computing and IT industries when they graduate from university in 10 or 12 years from now. Our industry will be very different then – radically different from how it is today.

‘If I can make a difference by encouraging more women to realize this then I will feel I have achieved something really important.’

A new research project aims to produce higher performance inertial sensors which could detect potential car accidents more accurately than any currently available.

Dr Michael Kraft and his team at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are working with a Belgian company, Melexis, to develop innovative control and interface systems to improve the performance of existing micromachined sensors.

In this three-year research project, Melexis, a growing Belgium-based company, which produces integrated semiconductor device systems for use in the automotive market, has supplied micromachined accelerometers (devices for measuring acceleration) so that the team can assess and improve their performance using their interface and control circuits

‘There is a huge, just recently emerging demand for higher performance inertial sensors for intelligent automotive systems and many others,’ commented Dr Kraft. ‘Six to eight airbags are standard already; they need to be deployed by accelerometers that accurately sense the impact of a crash.’

According to Dr Kraft existing commercial accelerometers may not meet these increasing performance specifications. His research programme will take the Melexis accelerometer and use advanced electronics and control engineering to make it better, more versatile and easier to integrate at a system level.

‘This research suggests a radically different approach to improve the performance of these sensors, namely to work on the electronic interface and control systems aspects of these sensors, rather than the microfabricated sensing elements themselves,’ said Dr Kraft.

The prime beneficiaries of this research will be companies supplying sensors for automotive safety systems. Other applications such as for GPS (Global Positioning System) back-up systems, virtual reality systems, inertial navigation and guidance, and seismology, also require sensors with very high specification characteristics.

‘Little research has been done in this field, yet there is huge potential to make a real impact,’ said Dr Kraft. ‘With this approach it should be possible to develop a very versatile interface chip that can be used with a range of micromachined sensors.’