ECS graduate Richard Jones has achieved spectacular success from his third-year computer science project. In 2002 Richard devised Audioscrobbler, which became a crucial part of Last.fm a year later. Yesterday (30 May 2007) Last.fm was sold to CBS for $280 million.

When Richard undertook his third-year project in 2002 he wanted to develop a system that would create a way of discovering new music, allowing the popularity of new artists to grow by word-of-mouth via a website dedicated to music enthusiasts. His ideas built on previous programs by including technology that could assess people’s tastes through monitoring what they actually listen to rather than relying on what they said they listened to.

‘Users of the system need to download software on to their computer that monitors the artists they listen to,’ Richard explained to the University Dolphin magazine in 2003. ‘The data is then collated and a pattern emerges by way of a technique known as “collaborative filteringâ€?. The results are recorded against a username and can be compared with the listening tastes of other members.’

At that time Audioscrobbler had 3000 users and Richard was planning to undertake a PhD in ECS to develop the service further. But the service became so successful that he decided to concentrate on expanding it after his graduation.

Audioscrobbler became a crucial part of the technology of Last.fm, a UK-based internet site combining radio and social networking, and Richard joined its founders, Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller on its board. The three board members of Last.fm were yesterday reported in the Financial Times to have gained $38 million each as a result of the sale to CBS.

‘INTERACTour’, an interactive tour guide for new students or visitors to Southampton, was the winner of the design competition which formed a major part of the new second year course on software development.

The course was created by Dr Steve Gunn and Dr Mark Weal with the aim of providing students with the skills to develop larger software projects, using the latest technologies. This year’s students, working in groups of five, were tasked with designing and developing a ‘Southampton Navigator’ to target a GPS-equipped mobile platform using the C# programming language.

The course culminated last week with a conference which included a keynote talk by Professor David De Roure of the ECS Pervasive Systems Centre, outlining his vision for the future of mobile computing.

Each team then presented their design and poster to compete for the Pervasive Systems Centre design prize. In a very strong field, the special features of the winning INTERACTour were its ability to orientate a new student or visitor to an unfamiliar area by providing an overview of that area’s facilities, using maps, summary descriptions, audio, icons, and photographs, all delivered to the user through the use of GPS co-ordinates. The students who designed INTERACTour were: Danvir Guram, Luke Lowrey, Adam Muncey, Nicholas Tudor, and Thomas York.

For the second year running an ECS team has won the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) competition at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, held this month in Hawaii.

The competition provides a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. Teams of agent researchers from universities around the world pit their agents against each other, enabling them to test whether their ideas about trust can feed into a generic problem. This year’s competition increased the number of player-agents from around 5 to 25-50. This tested the agents’ assessment of trust in larger populations, where they may not be able to interact with all their peers on a regular basis.

The game involved clients requesting appraisals for paintings from different eras; and the success of the appraising agents was judged on the highest number of clients and profit received for producing the most accurate appraisals. The winning appraiser agent (the Southampton agent, IAM), was the one with the highest bank account balance. The winning margin of the Southampton IAM team was 50 per cent, a significant increase from last year’s margin of 30 per cent. Team member Dr Luke Teacy said that this may be explained by the larger number of agents in each game: ‘With more agents there is more opportunity for our agent to discover reliable peers to interact with, and so increase its own revenue’, he said.

The winning team was led by Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the IAM group.

Second-year Computer Science students David Askey, Julia Tomlinson, Alisdair Friis Jorgensen, Andrew Taylor, Heather Murray and Claire Pass made up the winning group in this year’s project competition.

John Hamshare of BAA had set the computer scientists the software task of obstacle visualization for Southampton Airport. This required managing and visualizing a database of the thousands of obstacles - such as trees, buildings, and motorway gantries – with the potential to infringe on safe flight paths. Four groups of computer scientists met and exceeded the project requirement in various ways, from faithful mimicking of the operational system to dynamic 3-D visualization.

The Electronics Group Design project was to design, build and test a system for testing different data encoding algorithms under the presence of noise betwen the transmitter and receiver. Teams were expected to design the transmiting and receiving circuitry as well as modules for injecting errors into the system and subsequently counting them. Of the 15 groups attempting the exercise three showed outstanding results, demonstrating complete end-to-end solutions.

Paul Fairbairn, in charge of University liaison at the IBM Hursley UK Research Laboratory, announced the best group of the year: computer scientists SEG10. Group members each received a cash prize, and will compete in the national IBM University Team Challenge at Hursley in September.

13 June 2007. Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee FRS has been appointed a member of the Order of Merit (OM) by HM Queen Elizabeth II. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Research Scientist at MIT, and Professor of Computer Science in ECS.

The Order of Merit, founded by 1902 by King Edward VII, is a special mark of honour conferred by the Sovereign on individuals of exceptional distinction in the arts, learning, sciences and other areas. Appointments to the Order are in the Sovereign's personal gift and ministerial advice is not required.

A new proposal to use the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) to create and validate powerful new Open Access metrics of research impact will be presented this month by Professor Stevan Harnad.

Professor Harnad from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), pioneer of the Open Access movement, will deliver a keynote address at the 11th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics in Madrid from 25-27 June (alongside a keynote from scientometric pioneer and founder of the Institute of Scientific Information, Dr Eugene Garfield).

In his keynote, 'Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise', Professor Harnad will describe how he and his team at ECS will test old and new metric measures of research impact to validate their joint predictive power against traditional RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008.

‘This is a unique opportunity,’ said Professor Harnad. ‘The RAE is unique to the UK and the UK also leads the world in Open Access. We see Open Access Scientometrics as a rich new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analysing the growing Open Access research database, as well as providing powerful incentives to make it grow faster.’

Professor Harnad will also report new findings on the causal basis of the positive correlation between Open Access self-archiving and research impact.

Professor Harnad will deliver his keynote address at 9.30am on Monday 25 June.

An abstract of Professor Harnad’s keynote is available; in addition to an abstract of his new findings on Open Access self-archiving and research impact. Read a history of the Open Access movement.

Dr Averil Macdonald's contribution to the plastics industry was this week recognized by the award for Personal Contribution to the Plastics Industry. Over 45,000 schoolchildren in the UK have heard her Fantastic Plastic lecture, which was hosted from 2004 to 2006 by ECS.

How do you capture the imagination of GCSE students with the subject of plastics? Covering everything from Lego to false legs, Dr Macdonald keeps her young audiences enthralled with the multitude of applications and capabilities of plastics. Her talk and demonstration inspires students by revealing the physics and chemistry that give plastics their special properties.

The lecture has been hosted by a number of different academic institutions, providing a different flavour to the lecture from the different research specialisms of different universities. Between 2004 and 2006 Fantastic Plastic was hosted by ECS in Southampton, when the Principal Investigator was Dr Alun Vaughan of the School's Electrical Engineering group.

Earlier this year Dr Macdonald was honoured by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, when she was recognized as a Woman of Outstanding Achievement. She is based at the University of Reading, which is currently hosting Fantastic Plastic.

Three members of the School have been awarded Personal Chairs by the University. The title of ‘Professor’ goes to Dr Steve Gunn, Dr Alun Vaughan, and Dr Joao Marques-Silva, bringing the total number of Professors among the School’s 102 academic staff to 36.

Professor Steve Gunn was both an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Electronic Engineering at Southampton, before being appointed as a research fellow in ECS in 1998. He is a member of the Information: Signals, Images, Systems group, and his research covers two state-of-the-art areas: machine learning and computer vision. His work focuses on the development of techniques to convert these ill-posed inverse problems to well-posed problems through the careful design of a function space with an appropriate prior.

Professor Alun Vaughan researches in the area of the electrical properties of polymers and dielectric breakdown, understanding the processes of stress and ageing. He is a member of the ECS Electrical Power Engineering group and says that the group’s work in dielectrics is virtually unique in the UK. Next month the group will host a major international conference on the subject at Winchester.

Professor Joao Marques-Silva joined the School’s Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group in early 2006, from the Technical University of Lisbon. His research focuses on system verification, and he is interested in its enabling technologies: constraint solving and optimisation. ‘System verification is a key topic in industry,’ he says. ‘Large companies spend very large resources on this. New, more efficient verification algorithms are expected to increase system dependability and indirectly to bring large productivity gains.’

Boris Johnson MP, Shadow Minister for Higher Education, spent over an hour today (22 June) touring the construction of the new £55M Mountbatten Building. He was particularly impressed by the scale of the building and the potential of the work to be carried out there.

He was accompanied on his tour by Professor Harvey Rutt, Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, along with Professor Adam Wheeler, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University, and David Amos, Project Director for Bovis Lend Lease.

Mr Johnson was particularly interested to hear about Moore's Law and the extent to which the nanotechnology research to be carried out in the new Mountbatten Building would play a vital role in future developments as devices continue to gain in speed and decrease in size.

He was impressed by the scale of the building and the University's ambition for it to be world-leading research centre.

His tour of the Mountbatten Building site was part of a day-long visit to the University of Southampton which also included a tour of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Around 200 final-year students on the BEng, BSc and MEng courses received their final degree results today (22 June). After three or four years of hard work in the School, the presentation of final-year projects, and final exams which took place over the last few weeks, there were a large number of students gathered in Zepler Foyer to see the results being posted up. Celebrations began almost immediately and continued throughout the afternoon!

To get more of the atmosphere, read Read Rikki Prince's Degree Results Day blog.

Graduation ceremonies for ECS students will take place on Monday 23 July. The School currently has around 900 undergraduate students, and offers 23 undergraduate degree programmes.