This month, researchers from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will show how some of the latest developments in multimedia knowledge technologies can benefit cultural heritage and creative industries.

Dr Kirk Martinez from ECS and Dr Matthew Addis from ECS’ IT Innovation Centre will be present at this year’s Museum Association Conference at Bournemouth International Centre from 23-25 October to demonstrate how their software provides exciting new ways for museums and galleries to make their multimedia collections more accessible.

Dr Addis commented: ‘Our cultural institutions are fantastic sources of multimedia content. Yet users are often confronted by a myriad of resources to use, and have to guess what search terms to use, trawl through endless lists of hits, and cross their fingers that they haven’t missed the very thing they were looking for. We’re tackling the challenge of how to combine and make available multimedia resources in a way that fits with how people want to use them in education, publishing, public access and scholarly research.’

ECS will show how a whole host of advanced technologies including semantic web, content-based analysis, and cutting-edge user interface design can be used to find, navigate, create and use multimedia content.

Dr Martinez said ‘Most people are familiar with Google-style searching where we use a keyword to two to describe what we want. But what happens if what we want hasn’t been labelled that way, or if you don’t know what you are looking for? Being able to say ‘find me things which look like this’ provides a creative way to explore large art collections. Content-based retrieval involves the application of content-analysis techniques to collections of images, video and, more recently, 3D models, to support this new way of searching.’

ECS will also demonstrate eCHASE, a project funded by the European Commission which is investigating business models for public-private partnerships between cultural heritage content holders (museums, libraries, archives) and content users in education and publishing. Partners include two photo libraries (Fratelli Alinari and Getty Images), a publisher (Instituto Geografico D’Agostini) and a television broadcaster (ORF) who are providing and using content according to various interpretations of a theme entitled ‘wandering borders in Eastern Europe’.

ECS is developing the software platform for eCHASE which allows multimedia content from a wide range of organisations to be semantically integrated and easily used by professionals in education and publishing. eCHASE provides an excellent set of multimedia and multilingual content with which to explore how multimedia knowledge technologies can be used to search, navigate, link, theme and annotate content for use in a wide range of editorial products.

New Technologies for Cultural Heritage and the Creative Industries brochure

An innovative new system from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Ordnance Survey makes paper maps more flexible by combining the traditional map with the vast resources of the Web. Map Snapper allows individuals to take a photograph of a section of a map with a camera phone. This verifies the location and returns an electronic image with points of interest added which the user can investigate further by clicking on them.

Dr Jonathan Hare and Professor Paul Lewis at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) worked with Layla Gordon and Glen Hart from Ordnance Survey’s Research Labs to develop Map Snapper.

‘For example, if I am out in the country heading for Salisbury, the electronic map could give me the location of hotels for me to click on to find out more and could also tell me if there are any festivals or exhibitions going on there,’ Professor Lewis commented.

The team used image matching technology to retrieve the electronic images and make them available digitally. The technology now exists for digital images of this type to become a reality and the initiative could provide commercial opportunities for companies who want to advertise their features.

‘Map Snapper clearly demonstrates the power of new digital content, and yet puts it into the hands of the traditional paper map user’, said David Overton, Exploitation Manager at Ordnance Survey. ‘As an organisation deeply involved in both, we find this project very inspiring.’

Exactly a year to the day after fire destroyed the Mountbatten Building and clean room, demolition teams have moved on to the site to prepare for the construction of the new building. The new state-of-the-art facility is being designed and constructed with the needs of future generations of researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science and Optoelectronics Research Centre at the forefront. The new facility will be interdisciplinary and provide flexible research space for fabrication and characterization of materials. Although based on Silicon fabrication technology and largely using Silicon substrates, the new building will enable researchers to concentrate primarily on structuring and modifying materials at the nanoscale. These materials will include Silicon, but will also enable polymers and more exotic materials such as Zinc Oxide, high-refractive index metallic oxides, and lithium niobate, to be nanostructured. The work will create a new generation of unique nanodevices and applications to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of society. The new building will include research laboratories and offices, and will be fully linked at all levels to the existing Zepler Building. Construction of the new building is scheduled to be completed by early 2008.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS takes up office today (Wednesday 1 November) as President of the British Computer Society, with an agenda of public engagement for his year at the helm of the organization.

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in ECS and Director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Centre. He is one of four founding Directors of the new Web Science Research Initiative, a joint collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton to establish a new scientific discipline that will research the factors that have made the Web so successful and enable it to develop in the future in a way that we better understand.

Writing in the BCS Yearbook, Professor Shadbolt states his determination to engage and inspire the public on the subject of IT and computing. He points to the poor public image of the subject, particularly in the context of high-profile IT failures: ‘This failure of public engagement is potentially catastrophic for any IT-centric knowledge-based economy,’ he says.

‘We build systems that operate at staggering levels of scale and complexity. They use technologies that a few years ago existed only as laboratory prototypes. They use software systems that represent tens of thousands of person years of human ingenuity and endeavour. There is so much here to convey because it is always a human story of personal and collective triumphs and tragedies, insight and genius, heroic achievements and failures.’

Outlining a number of urgent requirements on which to base new initiatives with schools, the public, the media, business and the public sector, Professor Shadbolt looks forward to a year of evangelizing the concept of computational thinking—‘IT for all’, he says, adding: ‘This is a fitting challenge for our Society in its 50th year.’

The University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today announced the launch of a long-term research collaboration that aims to produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to guide the future design and use of the World Wide Web.

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the Web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the Web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions as, how do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How will we preserve the Web over time?

Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, “As the Web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.

“The Web Science Research Initiative will allow researchers to take the Web seriously as an object of scientific inquiry, with the goal of helping to foster the Web’s growth and fulfill its great potential as a powerful tool for humanity.â€?

The joint MIT-Southampton initiative will provide a global forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and complexity, and to develop a new discipline of Web science for future generations of researchers.

Professor Wendy Hall, head of school at Southampton University School of Electronics and Computer Science and also, with Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS a founding director of WSRI, said: “As the Web continues to evolve, it is becoming increasingly clear that a new type of graduate will be required to meet the needs of science and industry. Already we are seeing evidence of this, with major Internet companies and research institutions lamenting the fact that there are simply not enough people with the right mix of skills to meet current and future employment demands. In launching WSRI, one of our ultimate aims is to address this issue.â€?

WSRI will be headquartered at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT and at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Initial plans call for joint research projects, workshops and student/faculty exchanges between the two institutions.

The initiative will have four founding directors: Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, senior research scientist at MIT and professor at the University of Southampton; Wendy Hall, professor of computer science and head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton; Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton and director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration; and Daniel J. Weitzner, Technology and Society Domain leader of the World Wide Web Consortium and principal research scientist at MIT.

In his first major interview since taking office, Professor Nigel Shadbolt told the BBC today that the UK was in danger of no longer being a provider of 'really major insights in the information age.' Read interview

Professor Nigel Shadbolt took up office as President of the British Computer Society this month. His agenda for his presidency, during the BCS 50th anniversary year, is public engagement, and a major part of this is to raise awareness of the need for a bigger flow of qualified graduates to meet the needs of industry in the future.

Researchers in ECS have developed an interactive advertising technology which identifies passers-by and allows them to download information to their mobile phone or PDA.

BluScreen, a 58 centimetre-wide screen displaying information about upcoming seminars, lectures and events has been installed in the reception area of the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS).

The screen detects the presence of people carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices in its vicinity and begins to show them adverts, while at the same time building a record of what they have seen to ensure that messages are not repeated.

Now, Dr Terry Payne at ECS and his team have developed the system a stage further so that individuals passing the screen can pick an advert they like and have the information downloaded to their ‘phone so that they can access it at a later stage.

This works by individuals selecting the adverts of interest to them on a touchscreen in the reception area, signalling if they would like more information sent to their ‘phone, and then receiving a 'business card' download with just the URLs of the websites with further information, which they can access in their own time.

‘This could work really well in the cinema where people are relaxing and then see something that interests them which they would like to follow up afterwards,’ said Dr Payne.

BluScreen uses software 'agents' to represent different adverts. These agents have a fixed advertising budget and bid against each other.

‘The agents are interested in showing their content to people who haven’t seen it before,’ said Dr Alex Rogers who developed the screen with Dr Payne.

According to the researchers, BluScreen has definite commercial potential and they are currently developing systems to enable them to build profiles and to start matching IDs with markets.

‘There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about using smart tags to track the whereabouts of individuals,’ said Dr Payne. ‘The thinking behind BluScreen is that everybody has a ‘phone these days, so why not use this instead.

It also makes sense from a security point of view as our system does not pull anything off a ‘phone and individuals can switch off their Bluetooth functionality if they do not want to receive information in this way.’

A BBC film crew this month accompanied researchers from the School on one of their regular visits to the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway, which has this year shown a dramatic retreat of around 100 metres. The report will be shown on Tuesday 21 November.

The GLACSWEB project, undertaken jointly by the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the School of Geography at the University of Southampton, has been monitoring the behaviour of glaciers in response to climate change. Deep within the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway, Europe’s largest ice sheet, Southampton scientists maintain a network of wireless sensors which report data back to Southampton continuously on measurements including movement, pressure, and temperature.

Over the last three years the glacier has been retreating at approximately 100 metres a year, and the warm autumn temperatures of the last few months have contributed to a retreat of around 50 metres since July.

Dr Kirk Martinez says that three factors can be identified as major causes for the glacier’s melting: ‘First we can point to global warming as a result of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere,’ he says. ‘Second the negative phase of the North Atlantic oscillation brings less winter snowfall, and finally the presence of the lake at the foot of the glacier caused increasing subglacial melting during the retreat but also provided a fine-grained sediment base over which the glacier rapidly advanced during the 1987-96 advance.’

The rapid melting of the ice means that the glacier has become too steep and dangerous to work on, so the project will have to move to another glacier. However, the results from Briksdalsbreen provide much more general indications of glacier behaviour: ‘By charting the dramatic break-up of Briksdalsbreen we can predict what may happen to other rapidly melting glaciers,’ says Dr Martinez. ‘This has particular relevance to the outlet glaciers of Greenland, whose discharge has an important control on the thermohyline circulation, which affects the climate of North-West Europe.’

Further information is available at:

http://envisense.org/glacsweb/norway06/autumn06/BBCNewsinterview.html http://envisense.org/glacsweb/news/QA.html

Understanding memory is central to understanding what it means to be human. In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made great strides in identifying exactly how memory works: how memories are formed, where they are stored and how they are retrieved. At the same time technologies for managing and storing information – which are analogous to human memory – are becoming ever more powerful and sophisticated.

These two strands will be brought together at THE FUTURE OF OUR PASTS, a colloquium to be held at the British Library on Tuesday December 12, 2006. The event will see computer scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, librarians and information professionals debating some of the key issues surrounding the science and technology of memory:

· Will it be possible for us to replace parts of our memory with artificial aids?

· How can technology help those with memory disorders?

· Will communities be able to use technology to create or preserve their communal experiences?

· What will happen when our entire lives are available to us to look back on?

· How will this change the way we live?

· What legal, ethical and political implications can we expect?

The event is organised by the Memories for Life (M4L) Network and is intended to define the scale of these trends, to help experts and academics understand what to expect and to begin to shape the agenda for future research and development.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a Principal Investigator of the Network, said: “M4L is a project to bring together a diverse range of scientists, academics and experts to study and understand how memory works and to develop the technologies needed to enhance it. THE FUTURE OF OUR PASTS aims to foster concrete two-way interaction between different academic and scientific disciplines – only by such an interdisciplinary approach can we hope to promote the effective use and management of both the human and computerised memory.â€?

The colloquium will take place all day. Attendance is free, but the audience is strictly limited to 200 places. Lunch will be provided. Anyone wishing to attend, or needing information should contact: info@memoriesforlife.org

Researchers at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) are releasing open source software which will make it possible for the first time ever to trace the origins and authenticity of computer-generated data.

The research conducted by Professor Luc Moreau and his team has focused on the need to determine the provenance of digital objects, a concept whose importance is already well understood in areas such as art collection, where the provenance of an object helps determine its authenticity.

The work was done as part of the PASOA (Provenance Aware Service Oriented Architecture) and EU Provenance projects, through which the researchers aim to bring the beneficial applications of their work into the computer industry.

Over the past two years, they have investigated the role of provenance in computer systems and designed the protocols and data models to support its use.

Professor Moreau said: 'This will be a very important service for organisations in the aerospace and organ transplant industries, in particular. It will also have applications in the food industry and could be very useful in tracing the source of email spam and to ensure that information has not been tampered with during its creation and subsequent use.’

Other partners in the Provenance team are: IBM United Kingdom Limited, Cardiff University (Welsh eScience center), Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft - und Raumfahrt s.V, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Computer and Automation Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.