UK science and technology leaders predict the future of memory

“In the not too distant future a device the size of a sugar cube will exist able to record an entire life time of human memories,â€? Professor Nigel Shadbolt, President of the British Computer Society will say at Memories for Life on Tuesday 12 December. The conference, taking place at the British Library, will bring together leading figures from fields including computer science, psychology and neuroscience to debate the role science and technology will play in the future of memory.

“Technology has incredible potential to augment human memory,â€? Professor Shadbolt will explain. “Devices are being developed that will make it possible to enhance our memory with artificial aids and preserve the experiences we have, not just as individuals, but also as entire communities. It’s the unique combination of disciplines represented at Memories for Life today that will make these projects a reality.â€?

Opening the conference, Professor Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton will outline the challenges involved in combining organic and digital memories. Professor Hall will also raise issues surrounding the capture, storage and management of memories that must be carefully considered for conceptual technologies to become reality.

Professor Hall will say: “Technology can play a vital role in memory, for example by providing an artificial aid to help those with memory disorders or enabling communities to create and preserve their collective experiences. However, we must also consider the social, ethical and legal issues associated with technology development and how increased access to knowledge will affect our society in open, inter-disciplinary forums.â€?

As well as predicting the technologies and discussing the trends that will shape the future of memory, the conference will also address questions including the following:

• How can technology help those with memory disorders? • 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 must we consider?

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

Other speakers taking part in the event include: Susan Blackmore (independent researcher), Andrew Fitzgibbon (Microsoft), Katherine Campbell (BBC), Anne Sebba (independent biographer), Robert Perks (British Library), Andrew Charlesworth (University of Bristol), John Tuck (British Library), Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information), Gareth Crossman (Liberty), Sue Gathercole (University of York), Victor Keegan (The Guardian), Richard Morris (University of Edinburgh), Tom Rodden (University of Nottingham), and Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield).

The Future of our Pasts

Researchers in the School of Electroncis and Computer Science have built a prototype of a prosthetic hand with some of the functionality and movement of a real one.

Just 12 months after the ‘Southampton Remedi-Hand’ was lost in the fire which destroyed the University’s Mountbatten building, Professor Neil White, Dr Paul Chappell, Dr Andy Cranny and Darryl Cotton at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) have come up with a new ‘hand’ which not only mimics the motion of a human hand, but also has ‘senses’.

Dr Chappell has spent several years developing the ‘Southampton Remedi-Hand’. Increasing the number of grasping patterns and improving the sensory feedback from an object in the hand became key objectives of his research.

‘The last few decades have produced significant improvements in the design of upper limb prostheses’, comments Dr Chappell. ‘But up to now, there have been limits in terms of sensory touch and movement.’

Professor White’s work on developing sensors for the electronics industry has enabled him to develop multiple sensors to apply to the ‘hand’ to increase the functional grasping patterns.

‘We need multiple sensors in a hand to mimic the natural processes as far as possible’, comments Professor White. ‘In the past, cost has been an issue in the development of prosthetic limbs, particularly upper limbs, but we have found a way to add multiple senses using low cost technology.’

The researchers have applied piezo-electric sensors to each of the five fingertips which will detect how much force is being exerted on the tip and will translate this information into an electrical signal which will be fed to a small processor.

Dr Chappell said: ‘We have created a hand with increased functionality and with a sense of touch. This will let the hand know how tightly to grip an object like a coffee cup without dropping it, but not so tightly that it's crushed. It will also have an integrated slip-sensor which will tell the hand if something is beginning to slip out of its grip so it can grip slightly harder.’

Ends

Our 2007 full colour calendar features 12 stunning photographs, illustrating research highlights, student news, and latest building developments. If you would like a copy, email enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk Happy Christmas!

The US engineering profession's highest honours for 2007, presented by the National Academies' National Academy of Engineering (NAE), include the award to Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who holds a Chair of Computer Science in ECS, of the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize -- a $500,000 annual award that honours engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society -- "for developing the World Wide Web."

The prize will be presented at a gala dinner in Washington, DC, on February 20.

The Charles Stark Draper Prize (official citation news release)

Timothy J. Berners-Lee imaginatively combined ideas to create the World Wide Web, an extraordinary innovation that is rapidly transforming the way people store, access, and share information around the globe. Despite its short existence, the Web has contributed greatly to intellectual development and plays an important role in health care, environmental protection, commerce, banking, education, crime prevention, and the global dissemination of information.

Berners-Lee demonstrated a high level of technical imagination in inventing this system to organize and display information on the Internet. He devised a number of innovations:

The uniform resource identifier (URI), which is used to identify or name a particular resource on the Internet.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which provides structure to text-based information on the Web. With HTML, text is not restricted to a linear format; it can contain links to text, images, or objects in Web documents located elsewhere.

One-way and universal hyperlinks that can point anywhere on the Web, a simple but profound difference from other proposals at that time.

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which conveys or transfers information over the Internet.

Berners-Lee demonstrated brilliant vision by choosing to make the Web with public domain software that is scalable, so that it can always perform efficiently. Furthermore, the Web's open architecture permits other inventions to build on its unpredictable and limitless potential uses as needs arise.

Berners-Lee proposed his concept for the Web in 1989 while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He launched it on the Internet in 1991 and continued to refine its design through 1993. He persevered over widespread scepticism during these years.

Berners-Lee is now a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a professor of computer science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. In addition, Berners-Lee continues to guide the evolution of the Web as founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open, international forum that develops standards for the Web.

The Draper Prize was established in 1988 at the request of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, to honour the memory of 'Doc' Draper, the 'father of inertial navigation', and to increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology. The prize is awarded annually.

A technique which will allow silicon wafers to be stacked accurately and inexpensively in 3-D structures has been developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.

According to Dr Michael Kraft at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), the major challenge when stacking silicon wafers is to align one wafer to another, matching all the features.

'The alignment needs to be accurate,' commented Dr Kraft. 'At the moment, big chunky machines are being used and the process is being carried out optically. The optical path is long and this introduces errors.'

Dr Kraft and his colleague, Professor Mark Spearing at the School of Engineering Sciences, worked with Dr Liudi Jiang, who is now a Roberts Fellow in the School of Engineering Sciences, to develop what they describe as 'an effective passive alignment technique for the achievement of nanoprecision alignment'.

The approach adopted by the researchers means that the alignment features consisting of convex pyramids and concave pits can be fabricated and chip scale specimens can be successfully bonded after the microfabrication process. An alignment precision of 200 nanometres has been achieved.

'We have demonstrated that we do not need expensive machines to create alignment,' said Dr Kraft. 'Our system will automatically fit the wafers together like Lego.'

A new version of the open access software EPrints, being launched today (24th January) in San Antonio, USA, takes its potential to a ‘new dimension’, according to EPrints Technical Director, Dr Leslie Carr.

EPrints is already the world’s leading software for producing open access institutional repositories, which ensure that academic research is accessible and available on the World Wide Web. The new version, EPrints 3, will allow easier, time-saving deposits of academic research, benefiting researchers, librarians and webmasters, and making research more freely available to the public.

‘This brings open access closer to a reality,’ says Dr Carr. ‘EPrints 3 is a complete rewrite of the original software that addresses the key challenge facing repository managers now: how to produce a high value repository with quality assured contents.’

Dr Carr, who is based at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will launch EPrints 3 today (24 January) at the prestigious Open Repositories Conference 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.

'EPrints has already gained the reputation of being a popular and pragmatic solution for producing a repository,' Dr Carr he says. 'Version 3 takes it to another dimension.’

ECS leads the world in open access, Its EPrints software developed in 2000, is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

‘The launch of EPrints 3 is particularly timely,’ says Dr Carr. ‘In the UK the Research Councils (RCUK) have announced that all research council-funded research must in future 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.'

Backed by a support team with expertise in the research, library and publishing industries, EPrints 3 is the basis of a variety of open source, bespoke and hosted repository solutions. It will be available at: http://www.eprints.org

MailScanner, the world’s most widely-used email security and anti-spam system, has just reached its one millionth download.

According to Julian Field, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton who began developing MailScanner in 2000, this is now the best email protection system in the world.

'Reaching the milestone of one million downloads of MailScanner demonstrates the importance and impact of our e-mail research in ECS,' said Julian. 'Using the research resources provided by the School, this software has been developed into a world-leading e-mail protection system with over 60,000 installations around the globe. It is used in over 80 countries and handles mail delivered to all seven continents, including Antarctica.'

Julian also believes that the success of this operation lies in its open source system which guarantees its reliability, and the fact that its spam handling technology is ahead of the competition.

He comments: ‘Our spam-handling features are much more flexible than other systems. Even if our system thinks a message is spam, it can still let it through but can wrap it up in another message so that if it is offensive, it won’t hit you in the face.’

The success of MailScanner can be judged from the fact that it is used in some of the world’s leading organizations, including Vodafone Europe, US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities, and Amnesty International, Friends Of The Earth and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering.

This year's Multimedia Systems Conference provided an excellent showcase for the final-year Computer Science course in Multimedia Systems. The Conference was sponsored by Siemens Roke Manor Research. The conference, the seventh in the series, included 11 papers in four different sessions, a panel session on the future of TV, and around 60 posters were exhibited during session breaks. Students on the Multimedia Systems course have the ambitious task of organizing and running a day-long conference, in which their own research findings are presented to an audience of students and staff. Like a typical academic conference, the MMS event includes individual research project posters, anonymous peer review, and a full day of presentations. The keynote was given by Peter Lockhart, Head of Future Systems at Siemens Roke Manor.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have proposed a solution to ‘shill-bidding’, a disruptive but increasingly prevalent practice which threatens the integrity of online auctions such as eBay.

Shill-bidding occurs when a seller, or a friend or associate of a seller, bids clandestinely on their own sale. Sellers can thus increase the price of their own items or ultimately buy them back if the auction fails to achieve the price they want.

Recent media articles have highlighted the practice and the problems it poses for online auction sites (Sunday Times, 28/1/07 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2570548.html. Not only does it artificially inflate the sale price, causing financial loss to potential buyers, but it also erodes faith in the integrity and fairness of the marketplace. The practice is illegal in many countries and prohibited on most common online auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.

However, shill-bidding is notoriously hard to detect and harder still to substantiate, particularly in online auctions where it is easy for bidders to use false identities.

Now researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science who are at the forefront of auction mechanism research (Dr Enrico Gerding, Dr Alex Rogers, Dr Rajdeep Dash and Professor Nicholas Jennings) have proposed an effective and simple way of combating shilling, which avoids legislation. In a paper presented to the world’s leading conference on artificial intelligence in India this month, they demonstrated through simulation the effectivess of using different kinds of listing and commission fees from those currently in use on eBay.

Shill-bidding is particularly relevant to eBay since, in addition to a percentage of the selling price, eBay also charges a fee if the seller sets a minimum price in the form of a reserve or starting price. However, sellers can avoid this fee by placing a shill bid instead, thereby effectively ‘hiding’ their minimum price. Moreover, according to eBay, ‘sellers have found that setting the starting price too high may discourage bidding.’ As a result, shill-bidding becomes attractive to the seller since it provides a way of setting reserve/starting prices surreptitiously.

The alternative fee structure proposed by the ECS researchers takes a percentage only of the difference between the set minimum price and the final selling price. This fee effectively rewards the setting of a minimum price and has been shown to reduce the incentive for sellers to shill bid, as well as providing higher benefits to the buyers.