Letu Yang, a PhD student in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group, won the prize for Best Student Paper at the Communicating Process Architecture conference.

Letu's paper, 'JCSProB: Implementing Integrated Formal Specifications in Concurrent Java', was written with his supervisor Dr Mike Poppleton. The paper presents a development strategy and tool support for constructing concurrent Java programs from combined B and CSP formal specifications in the ProB tool.

The Communicating Process Architecture (CPA) conference is an annual international academic conference on the development of concurrent systems for both software and hardware. This year's event was held at the University of Surrey and included an invited presentation from Turing Award winner, Professor Tony Hoare.

Letu said: 'I was very nervous before my presentation since it was the first time I had presented at a conference like this. But it generated a lot of discussion afterwards, and I was very pleased to be awarded the prize for Best Student Paper on the final day, including a bottle of 12-year old malt whisky!'

Letu is pictured here, second from the right.

The glass panels for the external wall of the new £55M Mountbatten Building are currently under manufacture in Austria.

The glass panels are being made by Eckelt Glass and will form a striking feature of the new Mountbatten Building when it opens in 2008.

The new building will provide a world-class interdisciplinary clean room and office complex for the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

The new Mountbatten Building will be a four-storey concrete-framed building, fully linked at all levels to the Zepler Building, with an associated central utilities building and external single-storey service buildings. The building features an exciting design by specialist architects Jestico+Whiles ensuring not only that it provides flexible interdisciplinary space for research in nanotechnology and photonics, but that the world-leading research to be carried out there is visible and accessible from the south concourse.

To find out more watch video podcasts of the construction progress.

A new simulator developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, which has been downloaded over 100 times over the last couple of months, will pave the way for smaller, more competitive handheld computing devices.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi and his team at the University’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed NIRGAM (Network-on-Chip Interconnect RoutinG and Applications Modelling), a simulator which will make it possible to easily connect up the various cores which exist within a System-on-Chip (SoC).

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, as the demand for more functionality from hand-held devices increases, the current interconnection techniques will not be adequate to support more powerful devices, due to limited bandwidth scalability.

'The microelectronics industry predicts that in 2008 SoCs will contain over 50 processing and memory blocks and this will increase to 100 cores in 2012,' he said.

This led to Professor Al-Hashimi and Professor Alex Yakovlev at the University of Newcastle securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in 2005 to develop the next generation of interconnection technology for multiprocessor SoCs, from which NIRGAM has been developed.

‘The availability of such a simulator will be welcomed by the SoC and Network-on-Chip (NoC) research communities since it allows researchers to plug-in and experiment with different applications and routing algorithms using different traffic and topologies,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi. ‘The availability of such a simulator is vital for researchers since it will enable them to evaluate quickly their routing algorithms and applications on a NoC platform, and without the need to develop long programs.’

ECS Partners Ltd, a pioneering consultancy company run by academics in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), has notched up business worth almost one million pounds over four years.

Thirty academics and other researchers are developing their cutting-edge research alongside leading companies and organisations in the UK and across the world through ECS Partners Ltd.

This unique model of consultancy aids researchers to get their work into the marketplace and provides world-class expertise for technology firms.

It was the brainchild of Professor Wendy Hall, Head of School over the last five years. ‘This is state-of-the-art research which is ready to be applied practically and needs to be tested with industry. Our academics are keen to take part because the consultancy work is related directly to the projects they are working on,’ she said.

Research and development consultancy currently under way through ECS Partners Ltd includes:

• Eprints – specialist repository software to enable educational institutions and companies to make information available to all through open access websites.

• Development work on the next generation of web technology – the ‘semantic web’.

• Nanotechnology, the science of the very small, in the electronics industry.

ECS Partners Ltd was set up to administer the consultancy. The company is not designed to generate significant revenue for the School and most profits are returned directly to the individual academics after the marginal costs of running the business have been taken out. What profit the company does make is put back into ECS for the benefit of staff and students.

The company was created with support and advice from the University’s Centre for Enterprise and Innovation (CEI). Consultancy Manager Robin Axford from CEI said: ‘ECS is helping to change the way industry and academics work together in Southampton.'

From today (1 August) the School of Electronics and Computer Science has a new Head. Professor Harvey Rutt has taken up office as Head of School for the next five years in succession to Professor Wendy Hall.

Professor Harvey Rutt, a keen mountaineer, pilot and deep sea diver, is used to taking controlled risks in his personal life. He intends to adopt this philosophy in his leadership of ECS as he takes over from Professor Wendy Hall, who has been Head of School for the last five years.

As Deputy Head of ECS since 2002, Professor Rutt was part of the team which put the School back on course after the devastating fire in 2005. He is one of the masterminds behind the new £55 million clean room, currently under construction, which will be the best in Europe. State-of-the-art facilities like this are essential to the School’s continuing success, but Professor Rutt also points to more traditional values:

‘One of our great strengths is the breadth of our activities,’ he stresses. ‘From nano devices to high voltage engineering, and from systems on a chip to the worldwide scale of the Web, the Head of School must utilize the full range of our capability in Electronics, Computer Science and Power Engineering.’

He remains passionate about his own research and is on the brink of developing a terahertz microscope which will be 100 times faster than any existing and will be a very powerful device for studying materials. Looking at the way in which terahertz radiation interacts with biological molecules, and how infrared radiation can be used to assist in the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease or aid neurosurgeons, are also areas which fascinate him.

Professor Rutt is keen for academics to be bolder about research and one of his initial steps into the unknown was the decision to abandon CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor), a traditional fabrication process which offers certainty, in favour of a broader range of novel technologies. These, often based on nanotechnology and quantum processes, offer far more potential in the design of smaller, faster, more powerful devices.

‘For over 30 years the advance of electronics has depended on CMOS and "Moore’s lawâ€? which says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years,’ he said. ‘But Gordon Moore himself has said that â€?Moore’s law is deadâ€?. Devices are now so small that new physical effects take over, and we can’t just follow the CMOS road; the dead end is in sight. We need whole new technologies and approaches – that’s real research, where we should focus’, says Professor Rutt.

As he takes over leadership of ECS, he also pledges to make prompt, effective decisions.

'Although I have great respect for the academic approach to life and its openness and debate, I find its indecisiveness and its strange ambivalence about taking risks in research frustrating,' he said. 'To use a sporting analogy, if you have problems 40 metres underwater or half-way up a mountain, you don't delay in making a decision. You make your decision, move on and live with the consequences. I would like to see us adopting a similar approach to our academic life.'

The School's student-run Electronics and Computer Science Society is the first student society in the UK to be officially recognized as a student chapter by the British Computer Society.

The Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS) was established only three years ago to provide a full programme of talks, careers information, social and sports events for the School's 900 undergraduate students. Trademark events also include gaming competitions, games for girls events involving local schools, and special events for international women's day and science and technology week.

Now as part of the BCS, student Reena Pau says that more events will be organized to enable ECS students to keep in touch with the BCS and its broad range of activities which support computer science education in the UK. The School has strong links with the BCS: Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS is currently President of the organization and Professor Wendy Hall of ECS was President in 2003-4.

'I'm really looking forward to what we will achieve through this partnership,' said Reena, who is also BCS representative for Hampshire Young Professionals. 'If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for future events, we'll be delighted to hear from them at society@ecs.soton.ac.uk.'

Professor Margaret Ross of Southampton Solent University, who is President of the BCS Hampshire Branch, said: 'I am so proud of the members of the Society at the University of Southampton since they raised the concept of being recognized as a Chapter of the Hampshire Branch. Following a year of negotiations, it has now been formally agreed. This will bring closer links between the students and BCS professional members and we look forward to a strong collaboration in the future.'

The Southampton student branch of the IEEE, which is administered from ECS, has received an award from the organization for registering the best membership expansion in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The IEEE student branch received their award on the basis of Outstanding Leadership and Results in IEEE Membership Development Activities. The branch also won the regional award, again covering member groups in Europe, Africa and the Middle East for the quality of their web site, and are awaiting the results of the global web site competition.

The IEEE branch runs a full programme of seminars and social events throughout the year.

An ECS-designed system which relies on computerised agents to act on its behalf during emergency scenarios has been awarded a RoboCupRescue championship prize.

A team from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) was voted winner of the infrastructure competition in the RoboCupRescue World Championships (www.robocuprescue.org) which was held in Atlanta this month.

The team, led by Professor Nick Jennings, ECS Professor of Computer Science, developed ECSKernel, a simulator that plugs into a multi-agent research test bed.

ECSKernel was designed as part of ALADDIN (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data), a five-year project funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to research agent-based technologies to work in emergency situations.

The ECSKernel provides a number of functionalities that allow researchers to benchmark their coordination, multi-agent learning, and other agent-based techniques under settings that mimic the real world.

The Infrastructure Competition is a contest organised within the RobocupRescue Simulation league and aims at selecting the best infrastructure components that have been developed.

These infrastructure components will then be developed as part of the RobocupRescue Agent Simulation platform. The latter simulates the events that happen during a disaster in a given city and provides the framework for researchers to build agents that will represent emergency responders trying to mitigate the disaster. As such it provides a realistic playground for demonstrating, testing, and evaluating multi-agent systems based techniques that have been developed.

Professor Jennings commented: ‘This work highlights the importance of using advanced computer techniques for real world problems such as disaster response. We are happy to be at the forefront of work in this area and hope that many other groups around the world will use and build upon the system we have developed.’

The members of the ECSKernel design team led by Professor Jennings were: Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Alex Rogers, Kate Macarthur, Perukrishnen Vytelingum, and Alessandro Farinelli.

A new initiative to produce solution-based software is being launched next month by OMII-UK.

The new initiative, Software Solutions for e-Research, will provide packages to enable research to be conducted more effectively. It will be demonstrated at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting being held at the East Midlands Conference Centre from 10 to 13 September.

OMII-UK, a collaboration between the Universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester, was founded last year by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the UK e-Science Core programme. OMII-UK has already released software to perform chemistry simulations and clinical workflows ranging from the analysis of genes to weather forecasting.

According to Neil Chue Hong, Director of OMII-UK, they have now found ways to package software that will change how people approach their research.

'We are meeting a need that no one has fully addressed yet,' he said. 'We are not making impossible research possible, but what we are doing is allowing people easier access to computing infrastructures to make it easier for them to do their research.'

At their stand (Booth 16) at the All Hands Meeting, OMII-UK will demonstrate new packages they are developing, including Taverna Workbench, a user-driven tool, which will allow the management of several workflows through one easy-to-use graphical interface.

They will also launch a new data management system which will enable researchers to publish and share specific datasets and Campus Grid Toolkit which will make it possible for campuses to incorporate unused machines into a campus grid.

'Our goal is to provide solution-focused software which is of real value to researchers,' said Mr Chue Hong. 'There is lots of software out there produced by ourselves and others. What we are doing is showing people how to put it together in a way that facilitates their research.'

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School of Electronics and Computer Science, lectured on advances in optoelectronics last week to students of Delhi Public School, Rohini.

His lecture was held under the auspices of the Delhi College of Engineering Chapter of the SPIE. Professor Rutt is a regular visitor to India and has undertaken many lectures there over recent years. 'I am very pleased to give these talks,' he said. 'They attract large audiences who seem fascinated by the technology. Many have no idea that they use optoelectronics every day, every time they use the Internet, make a long-distance phone call, or a banking transaction.

'The lectures often lead to very lively question and answer sessions - sometimes making me think very hard to answer a question which goes right back to basics, or comes from an unfamiliar angle.'