A glimpse into the future of pervasive electronics, and a novel method for fabricating electronic sensors, will be presented at the University of Southampton next week.

These significant advances in electronics made in the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will be addressed by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and Professor Neil White when they deliver their inaugural lectures on Wednesday 14 February.

A champion in the quest to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in devices such as mobile phones, Professor Al-Hashimi will present a lecture entitled Mobile to Pervasive: A Journey in Electronics Design.

In his talk, Professor Al-Hashimi will discuss the innovative research which has enabled mobile electronics technology to develop to the point where it has become pervasive and, in the near future, could contribute to solving some of society’s large-scale challenges in the fields of energy and healthcare.

Professor Neil White, who has hit the headlines recently for his work on the development of the ‘Southampton Hand’, a new prosthetic hand which not only mimics the motion of a human hand, but also has ‘senses’, will demonstrate how screen printing, one of the oldest forms of graphic reproduction, can be used to fabricate sensors. A wide variety of different devices will be covered and examples given of their use in some unusual scenarios.

Professor White's lecture is entitled 'The Sixth Sense: A study of film sensorship.'

Professor White’s work on developing self-powered sensors has been well documented and work is currently under way to miniaturise such devices to the size of a 5p coin.

Members of the public are welcome to attend this event which will take place in the Lecture Theatre, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University Road, University of Southampton at 3.30pm on Wednesday 14 February. Tea is available in the foyer from 3 pm.

Latest images of the new clean room complex being built for the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre reveal a futuristic design that will create a new landmark for the University.

The new Mountbatten project is now visibly making progress. Just over half the piles have been sunk for the foundations and the pile caps are starting to be cast.

The main design consultants, IDC, with their architects, Jestico+Whiles, have been working hard in developing the design to a point where tender packages can be released. Most of these are now out and decisions are starting on which companies to use for the various parts of the construction.

This new facility which contains a clean room as well as associated offices, labs and teaching spaces, will be a state of the art interdisciplinary research complex, designed to meet long-term needs of the University research groups which will be based there. Completion of the complex is scheduled for mid-2008.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, FRS, inventor of the World Wide Web, will be looking back and forwards at the Web's development, in his inaugural lecture at Southampton, which takes place on 14 March.

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

A graduate of Oxford University, Professor Berners-Lee now holds the 3Com Founders chair at MIT. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential.

With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England, and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England.

Tim Berners-Lee is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) launched in November 2006 to 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 gnerations of researrchers. The other Founding Directors of WSRI are Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner.

Professor Berners Lee's lecture takes place on the Highfield Campus at 5 pm on Wednesday 14 March. Admission is by ticket only; to request a ticket contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk (tel.023 8059 5453).

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.

When Google-Gadget Award-winner Pamela Fox told Grid developers at OGF19 (Open Grid Forum Workshop 19) that she had written some code at 3am on Sunday morning and it had 6000 users by Tuesday, the OGF audience knew they had to pay attention. Add to this the fact that the first time she used a Web API was eight months before.

Fox’s Web 2.0 developers’ tutorial – entitled 'Web 2.0 Mashups: How People Can Tap into the 'Grid' for Fun & Profit' – was one of several invited talks at the workshop on Web 2.0 and the Grid organized at OGF19 by David De Roure.

'In Grid and Web 2.0 we see different approaches to building interoperable systems,' said De Roure, who leads OGF activities on the Web-Grid interface and founded the Semantic Grid activity. 'The workshop was the first crucial opportunity to see what Grid can learn from the successes of Web 2.0, like mashups,' he added.

The keynote speakers at the event at Chapel Hill, North Carolina,were Professor Noshir Contractor from NCSA, a leading world expert in social networks, and Professor Carole Goble of the myGrid project in University of Manchester who presented her vision of myExperiment – a social space for scientists which owes more to Web 2.0 sites like MySpace than to traditional grid portals.

Goble explained: 'myExperiment is about sharing the digital artifacts of the scientific process – like workflows, services and data – so that scientists can build on each other’s work. This accelerates time-to-experiment as well as insight and dissemination, and it enables scientists to be more creative – to be scientists not programmers.' The workshop also featured an update on Semantic Grid activities. Since its inception in 2001, many Semantic Grid projects have successfully completed, and best practice in this combination of Grid and Web technologies is becoming established.'When we wrote the Semantic Grid report in 2001 we presented the technologies we felt were needed to fill the gap between the e-Science aspiration and the Grid reality' said De Roure. 'If we did this exercise today, Web 2.0 would feature significantly.'

The closing discussion at the workshop observed that cyberinfrastructure can be built with both Grid and Web 2.0, and discussed this new manifesto. A second workshop is being planned.

For further information, including the presentations, see www.semanticgrid.org

An initiative being launched next week aims to engage the creativity and enthusiasm of young academic researchers to ensure that Europe reaches its full research potential.

The European Research Council (ERC), which will be launched at a conference at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on 27 and 28 February, is the first pan-European funding agency for frontier research across Europe, including science and technology, social sciences and the humanities.

The launch conference, which will address the theme of Excellence in Research through Competition, will be opened by the German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel. It is expected to attract approximately 300 high-ranking researchers and marks an historic moment in European research policy, as well as opening up new opportunities for the most talented and imaginative researchers worldwide.

Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, is one of only two UK representatives on the Scientific Council of the ERC and will sit on the opening panel on 27 February.

She commented: ‘It has been a tremendous privilege to be a founding member of the Scientific Council of the ERC. The Council is determined to fund the best research independent of subject discipline, geographical, or political boundaries. By focussing our first call on young researchers we hope to attract the brightest and the best of research talent to Europe.’

The conference will also provide a forum for members of the ERC Scientific Council to communicate the Council’s strategic intentions and to discuss future directions with the European and international scientific community.

Three new courses have been added to the School of Electronics and Computer Science's MSc programme: System-on-Chip, Micro Systems Technology and Nanoelectronics. Full details are in the new MSc Programme Prospectus, published this week. The new prospectus (pdf) contains full details of all the syllabus for all the courses, including the MSc in Complexity Science and in Web Technology, both of which were introduced this year. 'A particularly important aspect of our MSc degrees is that they are offered in subjects for which there is great demand from industry,' writes Dr Darren Bagnall, MSc Programme Director, in his foreword. 'These are also subjects in which ECS is at the forefront, and you will therefore be taught by academics who are world-leaders in their fields.'

A new cross-language research project could reduce language barriers across Europe.

The Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation (SMART) project funded by the European Union (EU) and led by Xerox’s European Research Centre in France, was prompted by the fact that research by the EU suggested that more than half of Europeans can only hold a conversation in their own language, and that existing document translation services do not always produce accurate results that scan grammatically very well.

'There have been lots of applications of machine learning techniques to machine translation in the past,' said Dr Craig Saunders, project partner at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS). ‘The project aims to extend the more traditional methods based on log linear models, and also apply recent developments in machine learning for structured prediction which have led to many new powerful techniques that show great potential in this area.’

Over a three-year period, SMART plans to apply modern machine learning techniques through English, French, Spanish and Slovenian to three user scenarios.

A first user scenario will focus on the work of professional translators and aims to assess the potential impact of new technologies on their productivity.

The second scenario considers the work of technicians providing support to customers over the 'phone, holding a conversation in a language different to the technical documentation available.

The third user scenario aims to enable users to access portions of the multilingual Wikipedia in languages of which they have limited command.

'This is the first time that new machine learning techniques are being used in this way,' said Dr Saunders. 'Xerox works across lots of different languages and cross-language information access could be very useful in this context; the possibility of posing a query in one language and getting documents back in another is useful in a wide variety of applications.’

Project partners on SMART are: University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, Amebis d.o.o., Celer Soluciones S.L., Jozef Stefan Institute, National Research Council Canada, University of Bristol, University of Helsinki, Università degli Studi di Milano and University College London.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Professor of Computer Science in ECS, is today (1 March) testifying on the future of the Web before the committee of the US House of Representatives that has jurisdiction over the Internet.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said today that although the evolution of the Web has been gratifying, it is by no means finished:

'The Web, and everything which happens on it, rest on two things: technological protocols, and social conventions,' he said. 'The technological protocols, like HTTP and HTML, determine how computers interact. Social conventions, such as the incentive to make links to valuable resources, or the rules of engagement in a social networking web site, are about how people like to, and are allowed to, interact.

'As the Web passes through its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about these complex technical and social mechanisms. We have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society. Robust technical design, innovative business decisions, and sound public policy judgment all require that we are aware of the complex interactions between technology and society. We call this awareness Web Science: the science and engineering of this massive system for the common good.

In order to galvanize Web Science research and education efforts, MIT and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have created the Web Science Research Initiative. In concert with an international Scientific Advisory Council of distinguished computer scientists, social scientists, and legal scholars, WSRI will help create an intellectual foundations, educational atmosphere, and resource base to allow researchers to take the Web seriously as an object of scientific enquiry and engineering innovation.'

The Founding Directors of WSRI, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, are: Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton, and Daniel J. Weitzner of MIT.

A Platform Grant (PG) awarded this month could have a major impact on the UK's system and chip design capabilities.

The grant for just over one million pounds sterling has been awarded to the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

It is a renewal of a recent Platform Grant which enabled ECS researchers to develop algorithms and tools for digital synthesis, to design low-power systems and to expand their research activities in analogue and mixed signal design.

'The renewal of this grant for a further four years is recognition of the fact that we are UK leaders in this field,' said Dr Peter Wilson of the Electronic Systems Design group, one of the key investigators on the project. 'The award of any Platform Grant is special, and to have it renewed is really something.'

Dr Wilson and the team of ECS investigators, led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, will continue to undertake highly challenging projects in system-level design methods and mixed-signal design, which they will validate through demonstrator projects.

Two of their key challenges are to push analogue mixed signal design into very small chips and to design nanoelectronics systems with particular emphasis on modelling, simulation and defect-tolerant logic circuit design.

'With the scaling limit of conventional CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) in sight, the PG renewal will enable us to develop new strategic directions by pump-priming adventurous research projects in nanoelectronics design,' said Dr Wilson.

‘The new Pervasive Systems Centre being launched in ECS next week will provide an excellent base for research undertaken within this PG,’ added Professor Al-Hashimi.