Although Hollywood often likes to present us with a world full of self-aware and destructive robots in the style of I Robot, this is not the way the science of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is headed, says British Computer Society President and ECS Professor of Artificial Intelligence Nigel Shadbolt.

Speaking at the BA Festival of Science in York tomorrow (Tuesday 11 September), Professor Shadbolt will outline how developments in the speed and power of computers, the emergence of the World Wide Web, and our deeper understanding of human and animal intelligence is producing a different but no less exciting future.

‘AI has had a huge influence on the past and present of computer science – it will be a large part of the future but not in the way you might think,’ says Professor Shadbolt, an AI expert in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

‘Computers are now one million times more powerful than when I started my research career – no field has come close to this rate of development,’ he says. ‘If transport had progressed at the same rate we would be flying from London to New York in less than a tenth of second.’

Professor Shadbolt instances the immensely powerful computing systems that can beat the world’s best chess players, translate documents on the Web from one language to another, and build robots that hoover the house, but points out that ‘these systems are not agonising about their existence or whether we are about to switch them off’.

He believes that we are now seeing the emergence of Assistive Intelligence which can be characterized as a different kind of AI. ‘These results can be seen everywhere,’ he says. ‘Rather than being conscious brains in a box, as Hollywood would have it, they are in fact small pieces of adaptive and flexible software that help drive our cars, diagnose disease and provide opponents in computer games.’

And he sees this as a trend that will continue. ‘There will be micro-intelligences all around us – systems that are very good and adaptive at particular tasks, and we will be immersed in environments stuffed full of helpful devices.’

Professor Shadbolt thinks that we will also see this happen in the Web and has been researching the next generation Web with Professor Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, and a co-director with him of the Web Science Research Initiative.

‘What is emerging now is a digital ecosystem,’ says Professor Shadbolt, ‘involving lots of simple systems which connect millions of complex ones – humans!

‘And when you have millions of people using smart software you start to see really interesting properties – forms of Collective Intelligence, such as Wikipedia, which is the communal expression of a great deal of our encyclopaedic knowledge. The Web will be smart because it will have assistive intelligence connecting human intelligence together.’

But, concludes Professor Shadbolt: ‘You don’t need to worry about the robot next door deciding to make a bid for world domination!’

Professor Shadbolt will present these ideas with a range of examples in his lecture, to be given as part of the British Association Festival of Science in York, at 6 pm, Bedern Hall, Bartle Garth, York, on Tuesday 11 September.

An ECS Apprentices event for children aged 7-14 and their parents attracted a capacity audience who were able to enjoy a full programme of events and find out more about the ICT curriculum from experts.

The event was organized by ECS PhD student Reena Pau and held as part of the Higher Education Academy-Information and Computer Sciences conference, hosted by the Learning Societies Lab in the ECS.

The ECS Apprentices workshop aimed to give children a better understanding of what it’s like to be at university, and to encourage them to start thinking about computing in the future. The participants learned about slime moulds and their potential role in computing, as well as creating drama and poster presentations. Parents also had the opportunity to discuss the ICT national curriculum courses with John Woollard of the School of Education, and find out more about what they can do to encourage their children with ICT at home.

This is one of a number of events that Reena has organized in the School over the last year and, she says, this one was particularly full of laughter and fun!

The web site of the Southampton student branch of the prestigious IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) has been named best in the world in a competition that was open to all IEEE student branches.

The Southampton student branch is administered from the School of Electronics and Computer Science and it has gone from strength to strength since it was established in 2004. Earlier this year the group also received an award from the IEEE for registering the best membership expansion in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, commented: 'ECS is delighted that the student branch of the IEEE has achieved such success. Congratulations go to the Committee for their hard work and commitment in running such a strong programme of events throughout the year, and also to Geoff Merrett, for designing and managing a very dynamic web site.'

The IEEE is the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. The Southampton branch is the 15th in the UK and the first to be Women-in-Engineering affiliated.

The IEEE student branch runs a full programme of events throughout the year, including technical presentations, careers talks, and social events. For further information, see the group's web site.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone, an expert in foundations of ubiquitous computing at the University of Southampton, has been invited by two prestigious organisations to help raise the profile of the discipline.

Professor Sassone, Professor of Computer Science at the University's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS), whose main research agenda lies in the development of high-level paradigms for global ubiquitous computing, has been appointed as Chairman of The European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) and as a co-organiser of the Royal Society meeting on 'From computers to ubiquitous computing, by 2020'.

According to Professor Sassone, his role in these two events will enable him to devise strategies to attract the best software researchers in the field.

ETAPS, established in 1998, is the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics relating to software science. Established in 1998, it is a confederation of five main annual conferences.

'Although ETAPS is only 10 years old, it has become one of the best software science conferences in the world,' said Professor Sassone. 'My main aim during my three year chairmanship is to make ETAPS the natural home for the best software scientists and engineers in the field and to encourage them to submit their work to the conference.' As one of the organisers of the Royal Society scientific discussion meeting which will take place in March 2008, Professor Sassone will help position ubiquitous computing as one of the scientific Grand Challenges of our time and pave the way towards making it a reality by 2020. This discussion meeting will also cover social and legal implications of ubiquitous computing. Co-organisers of this event are Professor Marta Kwiatkowska, University of Oxford, and Professor Tom Rodden, University of Nottingham.

Professor Sassone is also part of an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded team which will look at extending this challenge to an international context.

'We will need to build a solid foundation in computing and develop ways to predict the behaviour of systems if we are to meet this challenge,' said Professor Sassone. 'The fact that the Royal Society has recognised ubiquitous computing as a grand challenge and decided to dedicate to it one of its prestigious scientific discussion meetings is a major step forward and one which will help bring the topic to the attention of the wider community.'

A pioneering system developed by ECS researchers along with the School of Health Professions and Rehabilitation Sciences aims to retrain weak or paralysed muscles in patients who have suffered brain damage as a result of a stroke.

The system is being trialled at the University and local people are needed to participate in trials so that this technology can be made widely available.

Researchers from the University’s School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences and the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) have developed a technology to help stroke patients to re-learn movement.

Dr Jane Burridge from the School of Health Professions & Rehabilitation Sciences who is leading the research commented: ‘As far as we know, nobody has tried using a technique called iterative learning control, to help people who have had a stroke to move again. It is a great example of how state of the art control theory, normally used for industrial robots, can be applied to challenges in rehabilitation.’

Now, 18 months into the three year project, the researchers have tested the technology on healthy people and proved that it works and now want to carry out trials with local people who have suffered strokes.

Working with stroke patients, the team will look at how electrical stimulation to contract appropriate muscles through electrodes attached to the skin can be controlled to enable stroke patients to successfully perform tasks. The patient will attempt to track a moving target over a two dimensional plane by moving a joy-stick. The patient’s movement will be measured to detect the tracking error and calculations made to adjust the level and timing of stimulation so that the error is corrected. The ultimate aim is that through repetition, voluntary movement will improve, thus gradually reducing the need for artificial stimulation.

Dr Paul Lewin at ECS commented: ‘This is a very challenging project as it is the first time in Europe that this technology has been applied to humans. With robots, behaviour is entirely predictable, you can make them perform a task perfectly every time. People often reach a natural plateau in their performance, but if you can get them to repeat moves using certain tasks, they have a much better chance of recovery.’

Dr Burridge added: ‘This is a very exciting development of what could prove to be a user friendly way of enabling recovery of movement in patients who are severely disabled.

Local people living near to Southampton who are interested in knowing more about the study or participating in the trials should contact: Dr Jane Burridge, Email: sjh2jo6@soton.ac.uk,or ah10@soton.ac.uk Tel: 023 8059 8927

A-level students in Southampton are about to embark on an exciting competition to build their own robots.

Led by a group of University students, 10 teams from schools and colleges around Southampton will spend the next six months designing and building robots which will compete against each other in a grand final to be held at the University next spring.

In the future robots will be part of our daily lives, performing tasks in the home, and assisting us while we work, travel, and spend our leisure time.

The Southampton Student Robotics Competition is designed to highlight this aspect of robotics, and the 70 A-level students will be encouraged to produce robots which are sophisticated, capable of programmed movement to perform set tasks, able to ‘see’, and make best use of their own artificial intelligence.

The University students have raised substantial funds to enable them to support the school teams in their robot design and construction between now and April when the grand final takes place. Sponsors of the competition are the Motorola Foundation, Southampton University Students Union (SUSU), and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University.

Each team will be mentored by a University student who will visit the school every week. The students have spent the summer building components and designing the competition, and full details will be revealed to the school teams when they all meet at the University this Friday.

‘This is the first opportunity for all the school teams to meet and find out exactly what they will be doing,’ said Stephen English, an Electronics student in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is leading the University Student Robotics team. ‘This is a challenging competition and we are convinced that we are going to see some really innovative ideas and applications coming out of it.’

The event at the University this Friday (28 September) takes place in the Garden Court, Highfield Campus, between 12 noon and 4 pm. The school teams will undertake a team-building exercise, as well as hearing presentations on what the competition will involve.

An ECS team which won an automated trading agent competition believe their entry may form the basis for an automated stock market.

Professor Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science, led a team which won the Trading-Agent Competition (TAC) - CAT Tournament which was held in Toronto in July. The other team members were Dr Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Dr Ioannis Vetsikas and Dr Raj Dash. The team is now developing this automated stock market further.

The aim of the competition was to create software that would control a stock market, populated by automated trading agents, in the most effective way. In particular, this involved adjusting the market parameters (the cost of listings, the amount of information given out to traders and the fees charged) to create a market that is more appealing than the others that are available.

The ECS team, ‘IAMwildCAT’, beat nine other teams, with a score four times higher than the team with the lowest score. The overall outcome is based on how the competing markets increase their market share, at the same time as increasing the amount of profit they make and their transaction success rate over a number of trading days.

‘There are now lots of different stock markets/exchanges around the world, many of which have shifted online,’ said Professor Jennings. ‘All of these exchanges compete with one another for business and the one which works best with its different parameters will get the majority of the business. This was the case for ECS in the CAT competition. We won because we adapted the terms and conditions of our exchange to respond favourably to changing market conditions.’

This is the second computerised agent competition that a team led by Professor Jennings won this year, in July ECS also won the RoboCupRescue World Championships which was held in Atlanta.

The ARGUS project, a large-scale research programme involving BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Qinetiq, and the Universities of Oxford and Southampton, has received The Engineer Technology and Innovation Award 2007.

This prestigious new award scheme is intended to recognize the significant contributions being made to the UK’s technology economy by universities and industry working together. ARGUS received the Award for Large Company and University Collaboration.

ARGUS is addressing data fusion — how different sources of data can be integrated so that the resulting information is better than any one source. The project was initiated to meet future needs for distributed information processing technologies that can deal with the uncertainty endemic in our world. Its goal was to close the gap between the science of data fusion and the engineering needs of UK industry, where data fusion and signal processing are enabling technologies.

The ARGUS project, now in its fourth year, combines two technologies for the first time. The Southampton team, led by Professor Nick Jennings of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, is concerned with ‘agents’, computer programs that act on behalf of humans, with minimal intervention. ‘We’re interested in systems where a number of these autonomous agents interact with each other, where they have to co-operate, negotiate or co-ordinate,’ he said.

The Oxford team, led by Professor Steve Roberts, is applying Bayesian inference to engineering and life-science problems. When information is incomplete, Bayesian techniques can help work out what are the most likely outcomes of particular actions.

Working together the teams have developed software that allows agents to communicate with each other to solve complex problems involving uncertainty. Each of the three industrial partners is using these approaches for specific problems, involving air traffic control, wide-area surveillance, and aircraft engine service-scheduling.

The challenging nature of the research has brought the groups together: ‘We’ve all taken turns at doing things we wouldn’t have chosen to do on our own,’ says Professor Jennings, ‘and everyone has pulled into the project. For me, it’s the best example of a collaborative project I’ve done, and I’ve been doing them for over 20 years.’

The ECS team, based in Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia, comprises: Professor Nick Jennings, Dr Alex Rogers, Dr Talal Rahwan, Dr Rajdeep Dash, and Dr Perukrishnen Vytelingum.

The project is due to finish next year, but the Oxford and Southampton groups have formed a strategic partnership project with BAE called Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks (ALADDIN) to take the research forward. Aimed primarily at developing disaster management systems, ALADDIN is extending the use of independent agents and uncertainty-based reasoning into areas where resources are limited and continually shifting.For more information go to www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~argus/

New ways to search and archive images found on the World Wide Web will be revealed by Dr Jonathan Hare at a Royal Institution lecture in London on 4 October.

Dr Jonathon Hare, from the School of Electronics and Computer Science will join Dr Ewan Birney from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Dr Timo Hannay, Publishing Director at Nature.com to deliver a Royal Institution of Great Britain lecture entitled Searching for Science on Thursday 4 October.

Dr Hare has recently successfully completed a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brighton, which investigated the semantic gap in image retrieval. In this lecture he will reveal how his work with the holders of image collections has enabled them to search much more efficiently by incorporating an analysis of image content and annotations into their search and then use machine learning techniques so that the computer can learn to sort new photos itself.

‘Google photo-searches involve the search engine searching the words around images rather than the images themselves,’ said Dr Hare. ‘One of the unique aspects of our approach is that we have worked with real image collections and found ways to do an analysis of the images themselves rather than just the background information. The use of machine learning techniques means that in the future, the computer can be programmed to find images which may have no surrounding text by just using the visual content.

’Searching for Science will take place at the Apple Store, 235 Regent Street, London W1B 2ET on Thursday 4 October from 7-8.30pm.

Over 400 new students are being welcomed to the School this week. Among events taking place is the ECS JumpStart programme for Freshers in the School.

The influx of new students comprise around 250 undergraduates taking courses in Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering, and Information Technology in Organisations. During this week the new undergraduates have been experiencing a specially designed programme which introduces them to the School, the University, the City of Southampton, and their fellow students. JumpStart has been devised and managed this year by Sean Nuzum, a final-year student in Electronic Engineering and the reaction from the freshers has been very positive.

One of the tasks involves a group Treasure Hunt around Southampton concluding in the construction of a poster which highlights memorable parts of the City.

The School's MSc programme has attracted 136 students who are taking one of eight different programmes. Yesterday the students went on a four-hour boat trip from Ocean Village to the Isle of Wight, as part of their own induction programme.

Around 80 PhD and EngD students are also joining ECS. This will be an momentous year for the School since it will see the completion and opening of the new £55M Mountbatten Building.