Grid computing is promoted as the enabler for e-Science but may actually be missing the point. This is the argument that will be put forward by Professor David De Roure in his keynote address ‘e-Science is about Scientists too’ to be delivered tomorrow (Wednesday 27 June) at the eResearch Australasia conference in Brisbane.

‘Although it has the best intentions, the Grid is sometimes its own worst enemy’, said De Roure. ‘If we want to enable new science then we need to empower the scientist. Delivering a new infrastructure is only part of the solution.’

De Roure will argue that the grid community can learn from the evolution of the Web - and that e-Science developers should look to Web as well as Grid as their platform. ‘It remains a point of debate as to whether the functionality of the Grid can be delivered through the far simpler programming interfaces of the Web - I believe it can.’

De Roure, who pioneered the Semantic Grid initiative, is also organising the 2nd Grid and Web 2.0 workshop at the Open Grid Forum in Seattle (15-19 October 2007).

In the abstract of his paper to be given at Brisbane, De Roure writes: ‘eScience presents a vision of new scientific outcomes enabled by a new infrastructure. This cyberinfrastructure or eInfrastructure perspective brings with it a mindset of delivery of grid services to users. But is this approach fundamentally wrong? If we look at what researchers actually do, perhaps we will find that some new thinking is required. This talk promotes a people-centric perspective on eScience infrastructure and suggests that it is time to re-evaluate the Grid ambition.’

A conference being hosted in July by the School of Electronics and Computer Science will have great significance for the world's electrical supply industries.

At the 9th Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Solid Dielectrics, being hosted by ECS and held in Winchester from 8-13 July, physicists, chemists, material scientists and electrical engineers from around the world will gather together to discuss the future of dielectrics or electrical insulation.

According to the Conference Chair, Dr Paul Lewin of ECS, one of the big issues to be addressed is how we determine the condition of the insulation materials used in high voltage systems, a topic that is of crucial importance to the future of electrical transmission and distribution systems around the world.

'Most of the UK's power systems were installed in the 1960s, with a lifespan that was estimated at the time to be about 40 years,' he said. 'Our current challenge is to ensure continuity of supply by finding ways to predict when a piece of kit will fail.'

The conference will be opened by a keynote address entitled Ageing, Space Charge and Nanodielectrics: Ten Things We Don't Know About Dielectrics to be delivered by Professor John Fothergill from the University of Leicester on Monday 9 July.

As the name of this E O Forster Memorial Lecture suggests, Professor Fothergill will highlight the need for academics working in the field of dielectrics to be able to establish the age of a system and devise techniques for checking the state of ageing systems while they are in service. He will also explore the potential for the use of new insulation materials, like nanodielectrics.

In a full programme of presentations, 20 of which will be delivered by academics from the University of Southampton, the future of dielectrics will be explored.

'We know that many parts of the UK system are probably nearing the end of their useful life,' said Dr George Chen of ECS. 'We can replace them, but the costs are enormous so, not surprisingly, the industry wants to get the best value out of what it has already installed. What we really need to do is understand how to tell when a transformer or a cable is about to fail, so that it can be replaced just in time, minimizing the inconvenience and the cost to consumers.'

A research project carried out by ECS Master of Engineering student Sabrina Nefti has identified three research challenges that will need to be addressed before pervasive healthcare becomes a reality.

Sabrina, a final year student of the MEng Master of Engineering degree within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who will graduate in July, carried out a review of the current medical sensor technology designed to make independent living a reality for the elderly.

She has recommended that further research is needed into hybrid platforms, sensor design, and combining environmental health and activity monitoring systems.

'The UK population aged over 65 is estimated to rise from 9.3 million to 16.8 million over the next 50 years,' she said. 'A wealth of research has begun in pervasive healthcare which, as it develops, will allow patients to lead an independent lifestyle in their own homes.'

According to Sabrina, the use of sensors alone to monitor a person's activities, for example hand washing, can leave a subtle gap in information as the sensor for example, reports that the tap is opened but not that the person has washed his/her hands. She recommends the fusion of a RFID tag, an infra-red system and an acoustic system to provide more effective monitoring.

'I acknowledge that while hybrid platforms may be the way forward to bridge the gap, they are harder to integrate,' she said. 'Fusion techniques that require minimal cost and complexity need to be investigated.'

Sabrina also recommends the development of new sensors with high-level signal processing and transmission capabilities, and highlights the fact that her review revealed no research aimed at combining environmental health and activity monitoring systems.

'Such a house system which would be capable of sensing changes in an individual's activities would be a breakthrough in the field of remote predictive healthcare,' she said.

Sabrina was supervised by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, who recently set up the University of Southampton’s Pervasive Systems Centre, which brings together multidisciplinary expertise from across the school's research groups, ranging from sensors and wireless communications to computer science theory and practice, all working those making independent living for the elderly a reality.

A generator that is 10 times more powerful than any other similar devices has been developed by engineers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Dr Steve Beeby and his team at the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed a kinetic energy generator which generates electrical energy from the vibrations and movements present within its environment.

'This is the most successful generator of its kind and generates energy much more efficiently than any similar device of its size,' said Dr Beeby.

The generator, which is less than 1 cubic cm in size, was developed as part of the EU-funded є4.13 million VIBES (Vibration Energy Scavenging) project. It has been designed to power wireless sensors that monitor the condition of industrial plant and is intended to be installed within an air compressor unit supplying several laboratories within a building.

It could also be used in wireless, self-powered tyre sensors and if developed further, could even form the basis of technology for self-powered pace makers. The technology offers the potential to replace or augment batteries. The periodic replacement of batteries is not feasible for embedded applications and is highly unattractive in wireless sensor networks containing hundreds of sensor nodes.

'Vibration energy harvesting is receiving a considerable amount of interest as a means for powering wireless sensor nodes,' said Dr Beeby. 'The big advantage of wireless sensor systems is that by removing wires and batteries, there is the potential for embedding sensors in previously inaccessible locations.'

According to Dr Beeby, over the years, there has been a growing interest in the field of low power miniature sensors and wireless sensor networks, but an area that has received comparatively little attention is how to supply the required electrical power to such sensors, particularly if the sensor is completely embedded in the structure with no physical connection to the outside world. He believes that the VIBES generator could hold the solution.

A paper entitled A micro electromagnetic generator for vibration energy harvesting about this research has just been published on the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering website and can be accessed at: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-ffissn=0960-1317/-ff30=all/0960-1317/17/7/007

Dr Beeby and his team plan to exploit this application further through Perpetuum, the world-leading vibration energy-harvesting company which was formed in 2004 as a spin out from the University of Southampton.

Other collaborators in the VIBES project are: Tima - Techniques of Informatics and MicroElectronics for Computer Architecture, France, 01dB-Metravib, France, Phillips Applied Technologies, Belgium, MEMSCAP, France, Femto-st, Dept. LPMO - Laboratory of Physics and the measurement of oscillator, France, Phillips Research, Eindhoven, Netherlands, EPFL- Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne, Laboratoire de Céramique, Switzerland.

The latest podcast on the ECS News student channel showcases the MEng Individual Research project, through the work of six students, including Emma Lee-Choon.

The IRP is an ambitious project, which is supervised by academic staff on an individual basis and undertaken within the academic’s research group. The student undertakes and reports on research in a particular field and presents the results in paper form, conference presentation and poster. This results in a real awareness of research methods, giving students an insight into the research culture of the School and helping to encourage them either to stay in the School to study for a PhD, or to seek a research-focused job in industry.

Students talking about their IRP in the podcast are Charles Pickers, Emma Lee-Choon, Anthony Ambrus, Sabrina Nefti, Ian Cooper, and Rebecca Coath.

The latest landmark building on the University's Highfield Campus was formally opened by Baroness Platt of Writtle on 9 July. Half of the building's four floors are occupied by ECS computer science research groups.

The striking new £18 million building, opened by Baroness Platt, is the latest stage in the programme to redesign the main entrance to the University in Highfield. Located on University Road, close to the Library, the building has a 430- seat lecture theatre and houses teaching and research facilities for staff and students of the University’s Schools of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Education, as well as the offices of the University’s security section.

Research carried out by ECS Master of Engineering students has highlighted the most effective ways of identifying individuals in public spaces.

In two separate research projects, two final year students of the MEng Master of Engineering Degree within the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), Sarah Deane and Matthew Sharifi, who will graduate this month, addressed the growing importance of being able to identify individuals within a given environment, both from a security and marketing perspective.

Sarah’s project, A Comparison of Background Subtraction Techniques, highlighted the fact that most current Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) footage fails to give a clear image of an object because it is often obscured by background information.

Having reviewed several existing methods for taking away the background information and not finding any of them particularly effective, Sarah used several of these theories, combining them into her own implementation.

‘I found that background subtraction, although being simply defined as a difference between the background image without objects of interest and an observed image, has many difficult issues to overcome,’ said Sarah. ‘It was apparent that a simple subtraction algorithm was needed to allow the high computational efficiency that is required by CCTV applications.’

Matthew’s project, Audience Recognition in Public Spaces, compared the effectiveness of face recognition and Bluetooth as a means of recognising individuals within a public space.

He found that a camera positioned in a reception area was able to detect all of the frontal faces that came into contact with the system, whereas Bluetooth only managed to recognise 8.33 per cent of those who passed and was dependant on these individuals carrying Bluetooth devices.

The results have inspired Matthew to conduct a much larger video dataset, so that he can carry out further experiments.

‘Having observed the advantages and disadvantages of both Bluetooth and face recognition, it would be interesting to combine the two techniques into a multi-modal identification technology which could couple the ubiquity of face recognition with the recognition accuracy of Bluetooth,’ he said.

ECS communications researcher Jos Akhtman is part of the Southampton team whose robot submarine won a highly competitive European student challenge this month.

The student-led team from the University of Southampton was competing in the European Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge (SAUC-E), hosted at Haslar in Gosport by Qinetiq. Teams had to design, build and test their submarines, and over the four days Southampton triumphed, winning both the overall competition and an award for innovation in autonomy.

The team's robot submarine Soton AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) displayed good hydrodynamics, propulsion and battery backup to successfully complete a series of underwater tasks without human interference, beating the five other teams from universities from the UK and France.

This was the second year running that Southampton had entered with a team from its Schools of Engineering Sciences, Electronics and Computer Science, and the Underwater Systems Laboratory at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. The team had developed a three webcam image-recognition system as part of a high-level control system that could map and recognize objects. Sponsorship came from REAP Systems Ltd and TSL Technology Ltd.

Team captain, Alex Phillips, a first-year PhD student in the School of Engineering Sciences, summed up the day: 'We put in loads of hard work and are very pleased that the Soton AUV performed on the day.

'As each successive team attempted the course we began to realise that our run might be enough, with many teams suffering mechanical, control, software or operational failures. It felt great at the dinner to be awarded the prize for winning the competition and especially that for innovation in autonomy.'

Southampton team members who took part were Jos Akhtman, Maaten Furlong, Alistair Palmer, Alex Philips, Suleiman Sharkh, and Stephen Turnock.

Designed to inspire innovation and encourage the next generation of scientists and engineers to think about underwater technology and its future possibilities, the event is organised by the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

A new professor in ECS will work on making smaller, more powerful computers and mobile phones a reality when the new Mountbatten Building opens next year.

Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, who has joined the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) believes that the state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary research complex facilities planned for the new £55 million University of Southampton Mountbatten Building, which is due to open in mid-2008, will allow him to carry out extensive research into nanotechnology.

‘The new clean room under construction in the building, the high level of expertise available to me and the possibility of collaboration with other strong groups such as the Optoelectronics Research Centre, and academics in engineering science, physics and chemistry, will allow me to develop more hybrid devices and systems,’ he said.

Professor Mizuta made a major contribution to the field when he and his colleagues developed a high-speed single-electron memory and a new memory device called PLEDM TM (Phase-state Low Electron-number Drive Memory), which is a single chip which enables instant recording and accessing of a massive amount of information while consuming very little power, when he was a laboratory manager for Hitachi in Cambridge.

At ECS, Professor Mizuta plans to combine the conventional top-down approach to silicon nanoelectronics with a bottom-up approach which will enable him to introduce atomically-controlled nanoscale building blocks such as nanodots, nanowires and nanotubes to make his unique nanodevices.

‘We now need a paradigm shift from conventional ‘More Moore’ technology to ‘More than Moore’ and ‘Beyond CMOS’(complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor) technologies. I believe that if we adopt unique properties of well-controlled nanostructures and co-integration with other emerging technologies such as NEMS, nanophotonics and nanospintronics, we can develop extremely functional information processing devices, faster than anything we could ever have imagined with just conventional ‘More Moore’ technologies,’ he said.

Peter Molyneux, Chief Executive of Lionhead Studios, has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Southampton.

Peter Molyneux is one of the UK's top entrepreneurs in the field of computer games. He has been behind many of the ground-breaking, award-winning computer games of the last 15 years including Populous, Theme Park, Black and White, and Fable. Cumulative sales of these games now top 10 million.

His company Lionhead Studios is one of the leading and most innovative computer game design companies in the UK and was recently bought by Microsoft.

As well as receiving his honorary degree at the University graduation ceremony, Peter Molyneux also toured the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He is pictured here (right) in the undergraduate computing lab with Chris Lord (centre), who graduated this year with a First Class Honours MEng degree in Computer Science, and is now working for OpenedHand, developing software applications for embedded devices running Linux, and Tony Ambrus (left), who also graduated this year with a First Class Honours MEng degree in Computer Science and is working for the games company Rare.