This year's Multimedia Conference presents talks, demos and posters on Multimedia Storage and Retrieval; Multimedia Networking; Distributed Multimedia Information Systems; and Multimedia Content Creation and Applications.

The Conference is held as part of the third-year Multimedia course for students on the Computer Science and Information Technology in Organisations degree programmes. The students are expected to organize the event and run it as a proper conference, showcasing their own work.

Dr David Millard is one of the course leaders: ‘The ECS Multimedia Conference is concerned with technology that influences our everyday lives,’ he says’, ‘including the future of digital and internet television, games and virtual worlds, and new methods of collaborative working, learning and sharing. The conference is a great opportunity for students to discuss the technological challenges and explore how we may live in the future.’

This year’s conference is sponsored by JP Morgan, who will also be providing the keynote address. The event takes place on Thursday 17 January, from 4 pm until 10 pm, in Zepler Seminar Rms 1 and 2, and food and refreshments will be provided.

All students and staff in the School are warmly invited to attend.

A new edition of a student textbook, Digital System Design with VHDL, by ECS academic Professor Mark Zwolinski, has just been translated into four languages.

Published by Pearson Education, the book develops the idea of combining a text on digital design with one on VHDL.

VHDL is one of the two main hardware description languages used to design digital systems. Professor Zwolinski is writing a new version of the book to cover the latest version of the other language, SystemVerilog, to be published in 2009.

'When the first edition of this book was published, the idea of combining a text on digital design with one on VHDL seemed novel,' said Professor Zwolinski. 'The book has now been adopted by several universities as a core text.'

'Digital System Design with VHDL' is intended as a student textbook for both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

'It has often been assumed that topics such as VHDL are too specialized for second year teaching and are best left to final year or postgraduate courses,' said Professor Zwolinski. 'There are several good reasons why VHDL should be introduced earlier into the curriculum. With increasing integrated circuit complexity, industry needs graduates with knowledge of VHDL and the associated design tools. If left to the final year, there is little or no time for the student to apply such knowledge in project work.'

'Digital System Design with VHDL' has now been translated into Polish, Chinese, Japanese and Italian.

Rachel Burnett, President of the British Computer Society visited ECS at the invitation of the School's ECSWomen group.

Rachel Burnett spoke about her term as BCS President to an audience of students and staff in ECS and Law. Her talk 'BCS - this year's focus: activities, achievements and networks', sparked lots of lively discussion with regards to IT Law, the BCS and gender issues.

The meeting was hosted by ECSWomen, a new group which has just been set up this academic year, in conjunction with the Southampton branch of the British Computer Society. This is the first branch of the BCS in the UK to have affiliated a student chapter.

Two members of ECS academic staff have recently served as President of the BCS: Professor Wendy Hall (2004-5) and Professor Nigel Shadbolt (2006-7).

A new MSc programme in Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will equip graduates with the skills needed to fill the high demand in sectors from biotechnology to finance will be available this year.

The MSc which will be offered by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) in October this year, builds on the School's flourishing MSc programme which this year attracted a record 145 students. The School has also just witnessed its largest Computer Science undergraduate intake since the dot-com crash.

The new MSc in Artificial Intelligence is research-led and incorporates both traditional and state-of-the art aspects of AI and Machine Learning, opening the path to many different subject areas and technologies.

‘AI and Machine Learning are becoming ever more prevalent in our society,’ said Dr Craig Saunders, Joint Course Leader. According to Dr Saunders, millions of people are already familiar with some of the scenarios where AI technologies are already employed, such as: web search, weather prediction, financial forecasting and 'personal recommended items' on shopping and music websites.

‘There is also much potential for these techniques in bio-informatics and chemo-informatics where proteomics and genomics are benefiting from novel algorithms; as well as spam filtering, opponent AI in modern computer games, and of course, robotics.’ said Dr Saunders.

The course will enable participants to study the fundamentals of all aspects of intelligent algorithms with the freedom to choose options and specialise where desired. Topics in the course cover a skill base which is in very high demand from the academic research community as well as a wide range of industrial companies covering sectors from biotechnology to finance.

‘The school has been very active in this area and conducting world-class research for some time and has many researchers working in various elements of Artificial Intelligence, including Intelligent Agents, Machine Learning, Game Theory, Evolutionary Algorithms, Complexity Science, Biometrics and Machine Vision among others,’ said Dr Saunders. ‘We have had a strong AI component to our undergraduate degree for many years, with many students electing to focus on this aspect in their third year project, including the recent success of Richard Jones and LastFM who used collaborative filtering techniques to recommend music to listeners.’

New technology to enhance digital map technology is being presented by an ECS academic at the Electronic Imaging conference in California this week.

Dr Jonathon Hare from the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) will deliver a presentation entitled 'MapSnapper: Engineering an efficient algorithm for matching images of maps from mobile phones', at the Electronic Imaging conference taking place in San Jose, California, USA, from 27-31 January.

Dr Hare, who carried out this research in conjunction with Professor Paul Lewis at ECS, will describe how he and his team developed MapSnapper, a robust algorithm to enable mobile phone users to take a photograph of a section of a map with a camera phone and have returned to them a high quality photograph of the section with points of interest added which the user can investigate further by clicking on them.

‘The vision was a product that would allow users to query a remote information system based on photos of a paper map taken with a camera phone,’ said Dr Hare. ‘The information system could then return useful information to the user via the device. For example, the returned information could include such things as events, facilities, opening times and accommodation in the selected geographical area.’

Dr Hare will describe how the algorithm combines a number of computer vision techniques, including interest point extraction and local description generator with multidimensional indexing. The outcome of this research is a fast robust algorithm which enhances the quality of mobile digital technology.

As scientists get closer to engineering new forms of life in test tubes, the University of Southampton is set to host an international conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI).

The Artificial Life XI conference, which will be held in Europe for the first time ever this August, will be hosted by the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science’s (ECS).

‘It is a great honour for us to host this event which celebrates its 21st anniversary this year,’ said Dr Seth Bullock from SENSe, one of the conference organisers. ‘The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it first started out in the late 80s.’

The newly-formed SENSe group, one of the leading Alife groups in the UK and Europe, is already exploring the use of biological organisation in managing large-scale computing systems and has also developed a new type of biochip encapsulating a slime mould cell.

ALIFE XI will provide an opportunity for biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, social scientists and technologists to get together to exchange ideas and results.

Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, the inventor with Manfred Eigen, of the quasi-species model and the hypercycle concept, Professor Eva Jablonka, author of Evolution in Four Dimensions (with Marion Lamb), and Professor Andrew Ellington, a leading pioneer in the new science of synthetic biology. Topics such as artificial cells, simulating massive biological networks, exploiting biological substrates for computation and control, and deploying bio-inspired engineering, will all be addressed.

‘Our challenge is to understand the organisation of living systems via a combination of simulating existing life and building new life,’ said Dr Bullock. ‘Until recently, the term “artificial lifeâ€? referred almost exclusively to computer programs, or maybe robots, but the progress being made by synthetic biologists building real cells out of real biological material means that the field is on the cusp of a major step forward, and that this conference has the potential to be a real breakthrough event’.

Eric Cooke holds a unique role in the School as its first Senior Tutor. Find out more about his background, his role in the School, and his route to Computer Science in his academic profile.

Eric sees himself as an advocate for ECS students, and his role encompasses dealing with student problems and issues as well as teaching courses on the Computer Science degreee programme. He has also contributed to the University's international recruitment activities, and willingly travels around the world, promoting the values of a Southampton education.

The first ECS Careers Fair was attended by 1000 students seeking graduate jobs and summer placements from 33 diverse companies.

The students were able to find out more about career and placement opportunities with an impressive range of blue-chip and high-tech companies, including many local companies.

The Fair took place on Tuesday 12 February on the Highfield Campus, and is the first targetted-ECS event to have been held in the University. The enthusiastic response from both companies and students means that it will be held again next year.

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Many of the company representatives were ECS graduates, now working for companies such as Ernst & Young, Roke Manor Research, Selex Comms and IT Innovation. Among the most popular stands was the CV Clinic organized by FactSet. As well as the exhibition stands a number of companies gave short presentations. For further information about how ECS is keen to work with companies, see our Business pages.

A contingent of students from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou visited the School of Electronics and Computer Science as part of a UK tour.

The students, who were aged 16 and 17, were on a study visit to find out more about UK higher education. They were given a tour of the School of Electronics and Computer Science by Senior Tutor, Eric Cooke, which included the School's undergraduate computing lab.

Dr Neil Ross of ECS was part of the STORM project team which designed and developed a flight instrument now in orbit on the space shuttle Atlantis.

The Southampton Transient Oxygen and Radiation Monitor (STORM) instrument was on board Atlantis when it was launched earlier this week from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, destined for the International Space Station. STORM will be used in an experiment called MEDET (Materials Exposure and Degradation Experiment on EuTEF), which aims to measure how the hostile space environment affects materials used to construct spacecraft.

These materials, particularly polymers which are often used to form insulation blankets on spacecraft, for example, suffer damage from the combined effects of solar radiation, micrometeroid and space debris impact, and from exposure to atomic oxygen, which is the primary constituent of the Earth's residual atmosphere in low Earth orbit. STORM will monitor the concentration of atomic oxygen (AO) and the flux of solar X-ray and ultra-violet radiation.

Once operational, STORM will send back data at regular intervals so that the changes in the AO and X-ray/UV levels can be monitored over time. After two or three years of exposure to the space environment, the experiment will be returned to Earth for analysis and interpretation by the Southampton researchers, who will determine the effect of the exposure on the materials and instruments contained on board.

Design work on the instrument, which is a cube measuring approximately 15 centimetres on each side with a mass of approximately 1 kilogram, began in 2001 with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

STORM was developed by staff from three School of Engineering Sciences research groups, including Professor Stephen Gabriel from Astronautics; Dr Graham Roberts from Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics and Dr Alan Chambers from Engineering Materials, together with Dr Neil Ross from the School of Electronics and Computer Science. Ken Lawson and Dr Jeff Rao of the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University were also involved in the fabrication of some of the sensors.

Most of the design and development work was carried out by two Engineering Sciences research students, Duncan Goulty and Carl White, both of whom have now been awarded their PhDs. Several undergraduate students also took part in the development of STORM by carrying out project work as part of their studies.

The MEDET experiment is part of an international project between the University of Southampton's Schools of Engineering Sciences and Electronics and Computer Science; the European Space Agency (ESA); the French Space Agency (CNES), and the French Aerospace Laboratory (ONERA).

The NASA image shows the experimental package in the shuttle's cargo bay. STORM is just visible on the lower left of the picture.MEDET is the box wrapped in a gold coloured insulation material. Our package, STORM can be seen as a small aluminium coloured rectangle sticking through the wrapping material. Just visible are four of the UV radiation detectors (small round holes) and a rectangular Xray window covering two of the four Xray detectors.