Professor Michael Butler of ECS is involved in the £13.4 million EU DEPLOY project which is aiming to create new ways of building resilient computer systems.

With today’s increasingly complex computer systems which are often susceptible to malicious attacks, it is becoming important to build in resilience from the outset, rather than simply ‘adding it on’ at a later date.

The DEPLOY project will work across five of the most important sectors in industry today – transportation, automotive, space, telecommunications and business information – to create new ways of building resilient computer systems.

Professor Michael Butler comments: ‘What is encouraging about this project is that our industry partners are really enthusiastic and have recognised the importance of incorporating robust design into their computer systems. We are using mathematical models to provide analysis of these designs, which will help eliminate errors before the systems are put together.’

Scientists from the University of Southampton will work alongside academic partners from Newcastle University, University of Dusseldorf, ETH (Zurich) and Aabo Academy (Finland) and five leading European companies – Siemens, Bosch, Space Systems, Nokia and SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing).

Work being carried out will feed into projects such as the 2013 European Space Agency’s mission to explore Mercury and train security on the Paris Metro. The scientists will be using formal engineering methods to analyse the resilience of each system and refining these in an industrial setting to ensure they meet the needs of an increasingly technological society.

A pilot will be set up in each different industry sector, which will be tested and developed for a year before going into production.

Dr Darren Bagnall of ECS is talking about his plans to make solar energy a reality on BBC Radio 4's Material World (Thursday 21 February).

Dr Bagnall predicted last year that solar energy would become a truly cost-competitive energy by 2025, and he has been invited on the programme, along with Dr Ken Durose from Durham University, to discuss his plans to make this prediction a reality.

He will describe how he believes that large numbers of self-organised 'nanodevices' integrated within large areas, such as roofs, are likely to reach efficiencies in the 10-20 per cent range.

'The idea is to make solar energy work across large expanses,' he said. 'If we covered every roof with billions of tiny nanodevices, we could harness the energy we need.'

According to Dr Bagnall, the new Mountbatten Building currently under construction at the University will host a new state-of-the-art toolset including high-resolution electron beam direct-write, optical lithography to make his plans feasible.

With funding from the EPSRC-funded 'Supergen - photovoltaics for the 21st century', over the past four years, photovoltaics has become Dr Bagnall's most important research activity. His overall aim is to improve photovoltaics by the application of nanotechnology

Material World is on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday 21 February at 16.30.

Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Alex Rogers demonstrated decentralised systems developed for BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and Qinetiq at a conference in London this week.

Over the last five years Professor Jennings and Dr Rogers have worked with the University of Oxford to address data fusion in industry as part of the ARGUS II project. They have developed air traffic control systems which do not need a controller for BAE and decentralised engine service scheduling for airplanes and cars around the world for Rolls Royce.

'We set out to build decentralised systems which did not need any centralised controller,' said Dr Rogers. 'The advantage of this approach is that we could develop more robust systems which could behave autonomously with minimal human intervention.�

The ARGUS project, which won The Engineer Technology and Innovation Award for Large Company and University Collaboration, combines two technologies for the first time.

The Southampton team, led by Professor Jennings, is concerned with ‘agents’, computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of the humans that they represent.

‘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 probable outcomes of any particular action.

Working together the teams have developed software that allows agents to communicate with each other to solve complex problems involving uncertainty.

The conference in London marked the end of ARGUS II and Oxford and Southampton 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 autonomous agents and Bayesian techniques for reasoning under uncertainty into areas where resources are limited and continually shifting. For more information go to www.argusiiproject.org/

ECS is again this year contributing a range of popular activities to the University’s programme of events for National Science and Engineering Week.

The School will be offering a variety of activities at the University’s Science and Engineering Day, taking place on Saturday 8 March from 10.30 am to 4 pm in the Garden Court exhibition space at the Highfield Campus.

This event is specially designed for families and children of all ages. There will be fascinating demonstrations, exhibitions, and interactive displays and talks centering around six different themes: Space, Transport, Life, Light, Chemistry, and Technology.

ECS activities include: Madlab kit construction, where real electronic devices can be built; programming using Scratch, and Enhanced reality where you can design your own 3D object and take your software home.

Other activities include building a radio, including soldering the parts together, and testing that it works before taking it home; programming and operating a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in our Robotics arena, and making your own computer games and taking them home.

In addition to this the School is also sponsoring a lecture jointly with the British Computer Society, for local sixth formers. Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BCS by tracing the history of computation and looking forward to the future in ‘The Best is Yet to Come’, on Wednesday 12 March at 2 pm in the lecture theatre of Building 32. All are welcome to attend.

The City of Southampton played a starring and often inspirational role in the first Photography Competition organized in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The competition attracted 250 entries from staff and students in the School, submitting work in four categories: Southampton, the Highfield Campus, ECS research and project work, and life in ECS.

The quality of photographs was extremely high and the subject-matter surprisingly varied. Students had gone to a lot of trouble to get exactly the right angle and lighting, and, since many of the students were international students, they were approaching the City and the Campus with a ‘fresh eye’. The docks were a favourite subject, as was the Itchen River and the Common. Autumn colours on the Highfield Campus made for some stunning images, and some of the University’s architectural strengths also proved popular. Student life provided some of the most amusing images: students on a Unilink bus in fancy dress, Christmas parties, and diversions in the labs were among some of the subjects chosen.

The competition was judged by photographer Russell Sach, who awarded five prizes and commendations in each of the four categories, with special prizes also awarded to the best photographs from a first-year student and an MSc student.

Many of the photographs have already appeared in the School’s brochures and marketing publications. This image of 'Freedom of the Seas' was taken by Dr Jessie Hey.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM, FRS, who holds a Chair of Computer Science in ECS, has been named by Intel as the most influential person in technology over the last 150 years.

Intel brought together a panel of experts including academics, journalists and independent third parties to vote on technology’s 45 most influential individuals, in order to celebrate its 45 nanometer (nm) next-generation family of quad-core processors.

In the judging session held in London last month, the panel’s full top ten comprised: 1.Tim Berners-Lee – Founder of the modern-day World Wide Web 2.Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google 3.Larry Page – Co-founder of Google 4.Guglielmo Marconi – Inventor of the Radiotelegraph system 5.Jack Kilby – Inventor of the Integrated Circuit and Calculator 6.Gordon Moore – Co-founder of Intel 7.Alan Turing – played a major role in deciphering German Code in WWII 8.Robert Noyce – Co-founder of Intel 9.William Shockley – Co-Inventor of the Transistor 10.Don Estridge – Led the development of the IBM computer

‘It’s fitting that the people who have influenced the Internet turn up in the top three of the list,’ said Sean Maloney, executive vice president of Intel. ‘This emphasises the way the world is heading and that the Internet is our industry’s demand driver. As we saw at CES recently, people want an uncompromised web experience. Technologies such as Mobile Internet Devices and WiMAX promise to deliver just that.’

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was appointed to a Chair of Computer Science in ECS in November 2005. In 2006 he became one of the Founder Directors, along with Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, and Daniel J Weitzner of MIT, of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term collaborative research endeavour between ECS at the University of Southampton and CSAIL at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The School's undergraduate teaching of Digital Signal Processing has benefited from a valuable gift made by Texas Instruments.

The gift to the School of Electronics and Computer Science from Texas Instruments will support and enhance the teaching of Digital Signal Processing fundamentals and filtering in undergraduate Electronics and Computer Science degrees.

Texas Instruments contributed 20 sets of their TMS320C6713 equipment to ECS along with unlimited software support. Dr Matthew Swabey, who teaches the courses in which the equipment will be used, said:

"Programming and experimenting with these engineering development kits will give our students a real advantage in understanding digital signal processing fundamentals along with experience of a cutting-edge real-world digital signal processor architecture."

Robert Owen, Texas Instrument's University Program Manager, visited ECS to see students using the equipment in the Electronics Lab; also in the photograph is Dr Matthew Swabey.

New enhanced PhD Studentships up to the value of £18,000 are being offered for graduate research students beginning PhDs in the School this year.

According to Professor Nick Jennings, Deputy Head of School (Research), the decision to provide these enhanced Studentships is an indication of the importance that the School places on doctoral research. 'The School continues to make a substantial strategic investment in research,' he said.

'As a leading research School we already offer our PhD students some of the best facilities and research training available. We are continually looking at ways that we can increase opportunities for our graduate researchers and this year we have decided to award five Studentships of £18,000 a year over the three years of the PhD and an additional five Studentships of up to £15,000.'

These Studentships are open to UK nationals (or EU students who make the DTA eligibility criteria) and will be awarded to outstanding candidates who apply to undertake a PhD in the School. Applications must be made by 31 April.

Find out more about PhD opportunities in the School on our Research pages and our PG Admissions pages.

Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt addressed the Royal Society of Arts yesterday (11 March) to celebrate the new science of Web Science.

The three ECS professors are founding directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term research collaboration between ECS at Southampton and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a video clip on the blog pages of Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC Technology Correspondent, Wendy Hall explains the significance and ambitions of Web Science.

ECS postgraduate student Prins Butt has won runner-up prize in this year’s British Computer Society Comic Strip Competition.

The competition was open to all students studying an IT/Computing course and Prins entered because he thought that it was a good way of introducing students to practical and creative use of IT.

Prins is in his first year of a PhD in Computer Science at ECS, having graduated in 2007 with an MEng degree in Digital Systems Engineering. The inspiration for his comic strip came while he was helping his cousin fix his computer. He told his cousin to ‘Reboot’ the computer and decided afterwards to play a pun on the word ‘boot’.

Prins said: ‘When I entered the BCS Comic Strip Competition the last thing I expected was a reply, let alone being informed that I was a runner-up! For me, I was satisfied with just having the opportunity to have taken part and being able to write this on my CV, so I was very pleased when I received an e-mail congratulating me on my success.’