Professor Wendy Hall has received an honorary degree from the University of Pretoria, recognizing her pioneering work in hypermedia and web technologies, and her leadership in computer science worldwide.

The honorary degree of PhD was awarded to Professor Hall at the University's autumn degree ceremony in April 2007. The citation stated: 'Her pioneering contribution was to customise links, enabling the system to establish relationships between data and to store links as entities in their own right. Now the new field of Web Science will again revolutionise how we think about knowledge and information, drawing inspiration from nature or biology forevolution and growth and encompassing disciplines such as psychology and social and political science.'

The citation noted that Professor Hall's connection with the University of Pretoria dates from the early 1990s when she presented graduate courses in hypermedia as part of the new MSc(IT) degree. She was presented for her degree by Professor Judith Bishop, an alumnus of the University of Southampton, who also taught in the School of Electronics and Computer Science in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The School’s latest recruit is a Lego Mindstorm robot, gifted for student activities by the Institute of Measurement and Control, Wessex section.

The Lego Mindstorm system, which has sophisticated capability and functionality, has been given to the School by the Institute of Measurement and Control (InstMC). It will be used on undergraduate final-year modules in Biorobotics, but it will also help inspire young engineers of the future in local schools.

A group of students in ECS have recently begun a Student Robotics Club with the aim of involving local sixth form schools and colleges in robot-building competitions. ‘This is very much the kind of activity we are aiming to encourage,’ said Cevn Vibert of Silchester Controls, who is an Education Officer for the InstMC. ‘Part of our mission is to interest young people in engineering, and we have a programme of giving these robot kits to universities and colleges in the local region, where we know they will find enthusiastic users. They are not a toy, in fact they are highly customizable, and can do some amazing things.’ The £240 kits comprise a Programmable Robot Block, sensors, motors, PC Software and extensive additional building components.

‘This is an excellent addition to the School’s equipment,’ said Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, ‘and we look forward to seeing the inventive ways that our students will find to use it in the future.’

Pictured: Cevn Vibert (centre left) and Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner, with Kisan Visavadia and Richard Ashley-Smith, and in front, Rob Spanton and Stephen English of the Student Robotics Club, and Philip Bennett

A new book which offers practical FPGA solutions to engineers will be published next month.

Design Recipes for FPGAs by Dr Peter Wilson at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), to be published by Newnes Press (an imprint of Elsevier) on the 7 May 2007, provides a toolbox of design techniques and VHDL templates to solve practical, every-day problems using FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays).

An FPGA is a semiconductor device containing programmable logic components and programmable interconnects. They have several advantages over their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) counterparts, in that they have a shorter time to market, ability to reprogram in the field to fix bugs and lower non-recurring engineering costs.

Written in an informal and ‘easy-to-grasp’ style, Dr Wilson’s book goes beyond the principles of FPGAs and hardware description languages to actually demonstrate how specific designs can be synthesized, simulated and downloaded onto an FPGA. In addition, the book provides advanced techniques to create ‘real world’ designs that fit the device required and which are fast and reliable to implement. An accompanying CDROM contains code, test benches and simulation command files for ModelSim.

‘There are lots of textbooks around for engineers,’ said Dr Wilson, but many of them are a bit “abstractâ€?, designed to teach the VHDL language, or too specific. I set out to write something more practical with “real worldâ€? examples and solutions. I was inspired by the renowned “Numerical Recipesâ€? series of books and wanted to do something similar in a design context. In addition, we have designed and built a useful FPGA development board that is compact, easy to use and extensible’

On reviewing the book, Lewin Edwards, Design Engineer and Technical author said: ‘Design Recipes for FPGAs is an excellent volume for engineers who work with FPGAs either regularly or occasionally... the book provides a handy shelf reference with examples for many useful functional blocks, ranging from relatively small illustrative syntactic and structural examples to more complex concepts. Whether you work in VHDL (VHSIC, Hardware, Description, Language) occasionally or every day, you'll find practical help in this book.’

Southampton again leads UK university ratings for electronics and electrical engineering, according to The Guardian University Guide 2008, published today (1 May).

For the second year running Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Southampton has received the top rating from The Guardian, which judges teaching, staff-student ratio, expenditure on student, value added, A level entry points, and importantly, job prospects. The Guardian also considers student satisfaction results from the National Student Survey and, on both of these counts and on teaching, Southampton scores particularly high.

Computer Science comes fifth in the league tables, running close to York and Bangor. Again job prospects for Southampton Computer Science are particularly high.

'These are excellent results', said Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'We know that ECS is a great place to study and work, but it's good to see this reflected in external rankings. We're particularly pleased with the excellent job prospects for our students underlined by The Guardian, since this fully endorses the high quality of education which we are able to offer across all our degree courses.'

The University of Southampton comes 13th in The Guardian League Tables.

Rodney Brooks, one of the world's leading researchers in AI, will be lecturing at ECS on Tuesday 15 May.

Professor Rodney Brooks is Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.

In his lecture to the School of Electronics and Computer Science, he will be addressing the four key research challenges that must be met if robots are to become truly useful. These involve understanding their surroundings, being able to physically act on objects in the home, to communicate with the occupants in an easy and natural way, and to understand some subtleties of human interactions.

In the United States there are currently over 2 million floor-cleaning robots in US homes and demographics will increase the demand for home-robots and new applications.

Professor Brooks will look at how AI is responding to this need.

The lecture takes place at 5 pm on Tuesday 15 May, in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre, University Road, Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome.

This lecture is a 60th anniversary event for the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis (j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk).

Dr Alun Vaughan at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) has been made a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IoP) in recognition of his contributions to the field of dielectrics.

A dielectric material is a substance that is a poor conductor of electricity, but an efficient supporter of electrostatic fields. Dielectric materials are a vital element of all electronic and electrical equipment.

Dr Vaughan has carried out extensive research into the electrical properties of polymers and dielectric breakdown, understanding the processes of stress and ageing. His group at ECS has an international reputation and their work in dielectrics is virtually unique in the UK.

‘There are lots of other people doing things directly related to plant but in terms of the fundamental physics of high voltage dielectric materials, there aren’t many key players in the UK. If you go to the big international conferences, you find that what we do is of a very high standard and will compare with anything around the world.’

Dr Vaughan has now moved on to look at the field of nanodielectrics, which will be a key theme of the 9th IEEE International Conference on Solid Dielectrics on 8-13 July, which is being organised by ECS.

Dr Vaughan’s external activities include: Honorary Treasury of the Dielectrics Group of the Institute of Physics, a member of both the Executive and Council of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Power Academy, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) College member and Director of Southampton Dielectric Consultants Ltd and of ECS Partners Limited.

Commenting on his appointment as a Fellow of the IoP, he said: ‘I have been involved with the IoP for many years, both on the Dielectrics Committee for five years and as Honorary Treasurer. It is an honour now to be recognised as a Fellow of the Institute.’

For further information contact:

Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (tel. 023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

Professor Ted Nelson, Visiting Professor in ECS, and Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, will be giving a lecture on Thursday 17 May to celebrate his 70th birthday.

'Intertwingularity: When Ideas Collide' will look at some of the ideas that have delighted and preoccupied him throughout his career. There is bound to be enlightenment, entertainment, and plenty of surprises in his talk.

The lecture takes place at 5 pm in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre on University Road, Highfield. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.

All are welcome, and no tickets are required. For further information contact Joyce Lewis (jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk).

A new type of biochip encapsulating a slime mould cell has been developed by graduate student Ferran Revilla working with Hywel Morgan and Klaus-Peter Zauner in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

The chip provides a controlled environment to keep a plasmodial cell of the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum alive for several days. One side of the biochip is formed by a microfluidic system which is separated from the slime mold by a membrane through which water and nutrients can be fed to the mold. On the other side of the chip the slime mold is surrounded by 38 electrodes which connect the cell to an analog circuit which monitors the activity of the slime mold cell. The chip is transparent, a feature which allows, in addition to the electrical interfacing, also for optical interfacing with the cell.

Undergraduate student Paul Macey designed and built an electronic interface through which the living slime mold cell can be connected to a USB port on a computer. The interface monitors local mechanical oscillations in the cell by measuring the impedance between combinations of electrodes on the biochip. The USB interface also provides for stimulating the slime mold with light signals.

Because of the large size of its cells and the ease which with it can be grown the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood. The new chip will provide a way of interacting with the slime mold through a computer and is expected to contribute to the understanding of the slime mold's response to stimuli.

This ongoing collaboration between the Bioelectronics Group and the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group explores how microorganisms can be integrated into electronic circuits to create sensors and information processors with components that are alive.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, ECS (tel.023 8059 5453; email jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

OMII-Europe attracted large crowds to their booth and presentation in Manchester, UK. Project participants attending the event were constantly answering questions and demonstrating the software. Many people, both from e-science and commerce, were interested in finding out more about the OMII-Europe project and the possibility for future collaboration.

OMII-Europe (the open Middleware Infrastructrue Institute for Europe) is an EU project that is building interoperable software components to overcome the difficulties brought about by heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms. The middleware platforms that OMII-Europe is focusing on are gLite, Globus, UNICORE, OMII-UK and CROWN. The standards emerging from OGF are used by OMII-Europe to achieve interoperability.

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardisation effort for grid computing. Several times a year, OGF brings together the worldwide grid community to discuss the latest developments. The attendees of these events work in the commercial sector, in research labs, in universities, in press and analyst firms, and in government. OGF20 was held from the 7th-11th of May in Manchester, UK and attracted 900 attendees.

OMII-Europe is an EU-funded project with 16 established partners from Europe, USA and China, one of whom is the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Our photo shows Alistair Dunlop (Project Manager) and Stephen Brewer (Deputy Project Manager) at the OMII-Europe exhibition stand.

Undergraduate and MSc students in ECS are celebrating the opening of the School’s new computing lab. Before building work began on the new lab, the students were surveyed to find out their priorities for the new space. It was then designed expressly to reflect their desire for group-working and lap-top use.

The layout of the lab makes best use of the area, with desks arranged where possible in islands of six. Most of the School group activities involve teams of four, five, or six. A break out area will provide six further group spaces, and can also be used for student seminars. The Helpdesk staff, Andrew Landells and Toby Hunt, have an expanded office within the lab, next to the entrance.

Dr Andrew Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies, acted as project champion for the new lab. ‘The success of this new facility is about more than just the latest technology,’ he said. ‘An important reason that students work in the Lab is that they know things work pretty well almost all the time – and if something isn’t working, for whatever reason, the staff from our Helpdesk, or their fellow students, will be willing and able to sort the problem out.’

View podcast about our new computing lab.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis, ECS Communications Manager (tel.023 8059 5453; email j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk)