ECS students reached the University's Intra-Mural Basketball final on their first time in the competition.

The team, comprising Emmanuel Munyadzwe, Richard Kay, Jason Kirk, Deng Yingmao, Wang Yang, Yang Tao, Teng Long Ip, was representing the Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS) and achieved third place, after losing to 'Infinity' 21-13, but beating Physoc, 24-19.

'This really helps to overturn the typical stereotypical view of ECSS students as "computer geeks",' said ECSS Sports Convenor Alan Huynh, 'and we'll be back next year with a great chance of winning.

'ECS students are born winners!' he added. 'I'm hoping we can build on this platform and increase our sports activities in the future.'

In a 26-minute interview with BBC Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about privacy, Web Science, and the Web's future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee addressed the Royal Society of Arts last week on Web Science, the subject-matter which forms the core of the Web Science Research Initiative, a joint research collaboration between the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Sir Tim is a founder director of WSRI, along with Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, and Daniel J Weitzner of MIT.

'The Web is a mass of humanity connected by technology,' he said, adding that it was imperative that systems designers should consider the future development of their systems more carefully.

Powerful new ways in which universities are self-archiving their research output are being showcased at the Open Repositories 2008 (OR08) conference, hosted by ECS.

OR08, the international meeting on Open Repositories, is being held at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton from 1-4 April. ECS, the world's first school to adopt an open-access self-archiving mandate has been a world-leader in the Open Access (OA) movement since its inception.

Repositories play a pivotal role in the evolving scholarly information environment of open access research outputs and scholarly collections. With its theme of Practice and Innovation, OR08 will create an opportunity for practitioners and researchers to share experiences and to explore the challenges of the new scholarly communication.

Participants are also invited to a special conference session on University Open Access entitled The University's Mission, Management and Mandate in the Open Access Era, which has been organised by Dr Les Carr at ECS and will take place on Friday 4 April.

The session will be led by Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liege and Founder of EurOpenScholar, the aim of which is to inform European universities about Open Access and increase the number of European universities with mandatory Open Access policies.

Professor Rentier will describe exciting and innovative ways for EurOpenScholar and the European University Association to work together to push forward the OA agenda in Europe. Other speakers are at this event are Dr John Smith, Deputy Secretary General, European University Association and Dr Alma Swan, Key Perspectives Ltd.

Professor Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University and one of the founders of the OA worldwide movement, who will outline the major challenges facing OA, said: 'So far, there have been 39 university and funder OA self-archiving mandates worldwide, including those of Southampton, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts & Sciences, six of the seven UK research councils and National Institutes of Health in the USA and in Italy.'

OR08 will also invite participants to take part in a new Repository Challenge prize activity to produce demonstrations of novel repository capability. The aim is to get delegates working in small teams to try to pull together established platforms and services to demonstrate a glimpse of some real-life, user-relevant scenarios and services. An awards ceremony at the conference dinner will celebrate the achievements of the teams.

PODCAST:126

Teams of young engineers from local schools and colleges will be taking part in the final this Saturday (12 April) of the Student Robotics Competition, organized by ECS students.

The sixth-form students have been working with University students since last October, to produce fully autonomous robots that are able to undertake a series of complex challenges in Saturday’s final. Since there is no remote control allowed, the robots have to drive and direct themselves, find objects and bring them back to base to receive points.

Each team is made up of six students and many of them have volunteered to give up part of the Easter break to get their robots in top shape for Saturday’s competition. The local colleges involved are: St Anne’s School, Southampton; Fareham College; Totton College; Southampton City College; Peter Symonds College, Winchester; and Brockenhurst College.

The event was initiated by a group of Electronics students in the School of Electronics and Computer Science who had themselves been involved in robotics competitions before coming to University. They felt this was a really interesting way to get pre-University students interested in engineering and so undertook to provide mentoring and support in the schools and colleges over a six-month period.

‘All the teams have embraced this fantastic opportunity to take on a great challenge,’ said Stephen English, a final-year Electronics student at the University. ‘Working as a team over six months they have developed a breadth of skills beyond the A level syllabus and we are tremendously proud of their achievements. We are looking forward to a really exciting event on Saturday when they get the chance to show what their robots can do!’

The competition final takes place in the University Students’ Union Building (in a specially constructed arena) on Saturday 12 April, from 10.30 am. The competition takes place throughout the day, with prizegiving scheduled for 4.30 pm.

The Student Robotics Competition has been sponsored by Motorola, the University of Southampton, and the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

It is hoped that this will now become an annual event for local schools and colleges.

The University of Southampton announced a University-wide Open Access mandate at the Open Repositories (OR08) conference last week (4 April).

The University became the first* in the UK to announce that it would henceforth require all academic staff to make all their published research available online. The announcement was made by University Librarian Dr Mark Brown, speaking at the Open Repositories conference which, fittingly, was hosted by the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). In 2001 ECS became the first in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate.

ECS has been at the forefront of the Open Access movement worldwide, providing tools, data and policy models. The EPrints archiving software which it developed and supports was the first of its kind and is now widely used worldwide, currently supporting 251 known archives with over 440,000 records of research publications.

Professor Stevan Harnad, a founding figure of the Open Access movement, holds a Chair in ECS. He has warmly welcomed the Southampton mandate, as well as a mandate at Stirling University, announced almost simultaneously with Southampton’s, and notes in his blog that the OA momentum is notably gathering force in Europe, with the European University Association (EUA) unanimously recommending OA self-archiving mandates for its 791 universities in 46 countries.

*or second - Stirling University announced its own mandate on 9 April.

Professor Jan Sykulski led a strong ECS presence at the IET International Conference on Computation in Electromagnetics.

The seventh conference in this annual international series was held in Brighton from 7 and 10 April. Professor Jan Sykulski, Head of the School's Electrical Power Engineering research group, chairs the IET's Electromagnetics Network and opened and closed the conference, as well as delivering a review lecture on optimisation. Three other members of the EPE group attended the conference, including Dr Igor Golosnoy (pictured here, presenting a paper co-authored with Professor Sykulski). In all EPE contributed 10 papers to the conference. All papers were presented in interaction presentations as posters with scene-setting lectures.

New Semantic Web technology which will enable more effective teaching in hospital scenarios is being developed at ECS.

Dr Mark Weal of ECS is designing a software solution which will make it possible for nursing students to receive annotated video-captured feedback immediately after their participation in simulated practice events.

The project, known locally as Big Sister, looks at using semantic annotation to enhance skills-based learning for healthcare.

‘From the student perspective, one of the most important components of simulation is the quality of feedback on their performance,’ said Dr Weal. ‘Practical considerations limit the potential use of video in debriefing students immediately after simulation. It may only be possible to video replay the whole simulation or skip to segments of interest, requiring the facilitator to have a near perfect memory of events.’

Professor David De Roure at ECS and his team in conjunction with colleagues in the School of Nursing and Midwifery are using Semantic Web technologies to annotate video in real time for rapid editing and playback so that educationalists can click on areas of interest and annotate relevant sections with text and 'bookmarking'.

The project is based around scenario-driven skills-based learning in hospital ward simulations located within teaching facilities. Students participate in simulator-based scenarios in groups of three or four and are presented with a patient with a range of symptoms which require them to perform as they would in a hospital environment. Each scenario session is followed by a debriefing session involving the participating students, the observers and the mentors who facilitated the session.

‘The aims of this project are to take this existing setup and through the use of semantic annotation augment the learning process to provide more focused debriefing and better personal reflection by the students of the process they have been through,’ said Dr Weal. ‘It will also provide a rich source of information to inform the teaching practices of the mentor involved.’

ECSWomen were VIP guests of Google London this week when they were invited to the groundbreaking technology company’s showcase UK headquarters.

Understanding how hi-tech companies operate is an essential skill for today’s graduates. This opportunity for face-to-face discussions is just one example of the opportunities which ECS is providing for our important minority of top quality female students. 'We all had such a great time,' said MEng Software Engineering student and ECSWomen committee member Despina Zenonos.

The meeting was hosted by Eleanor Mulligan and Vicky Greaves from Google. Eight students from across a range of ECS computing and electronics degrees participated. The meeting was set up by Dr Su White who has special responsibility for the graduate employability agenda in ECS. This is just one of the many ways in which ECSWomen is providing informal support and networking opportunities in the school. ECSWomen is currently led by postgrad student Reena Pau. 'ECSwomen is an brilliant initiative,' commented Dr White. 'Like our Student Society the achievements of ECSWomen show how students themselves can establish really effective support networks which can contribute to academic and personal objectives. There is really heavy competition to get jobs with Google, but we already have ECS graduates working there; and we are keen to encourage current undergrads to apply for internships.'

ECSwomen will be working to build an ongoing relationship with Google. The current term-time programme includes scheduled evening talks and informal lunchtime support meetings. They are also talking with Girl Geek Dinners to establish a local meeting to provide students with even more networking opportunities.

ECSWomen are on Facebook

Developers from ECS, Southampton, and Oxford University won a $5000 challenge competition which took place at the OR08 Open Repositories international conference.

Dave Tarrant, Tim Brody (Southampton) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford), beat a large field of contenders, including finalists from the USA and Australia, by demonstrating that digital data can be moved easily between storage sites running different software while remaining accessible to users (watch video). This approach has important implications for data management and preservation on the Web.

Repository sites have become a global phenomenon in higher education and research as a growing number of institutions collect digital information and make it accessible on the Web. There are now over 1000 repositories worldwide.

However, with the growth of institutional repositories alongside subject-based repositories, and in cases where multiple-authors of a paper belong to different institutions, it is important to be able to share and copy content between repositories.

Meanwhile the repository space has become characterised by many types of repository software - DSpace, EPrints and Fedora are the most widely used open source repository software - containing many different types of content, including texts, multimedia and interactive teaching materials. So although sharing content and making it widely available (interoperability) has always been a driver for repository development, actually moving content on a large scale between repositories and providing access from all sources is not easy.

The OR08 challenge, set by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), had just one rule for the competition: the prototype created had to utilise two different 'repository' platforms.

The winning demonstrator showed data being copied simply from an EPrints repository to a Fedora repository, and then moved back in the other direction. What was striking is that among repository softwares, EPrints and Fedora are seen as being quite different in the way they handle data, so the approach used is likely to be just as useful with other repository softwarel.

This data transfer was achieved using an emerging framework known as Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a topic that attracted one of the highest attendances at OR08. ORE is yet to appear in beta form, but specifications are being developed that allow distributed repositories to exchange information about their digital contents.

According to Dave Tarrant, ‘Interoperability is the innovation. We think it is a bad idea to reinvent the wheel so with the availability and support for ORE growing, this provides a very suitable technology to provide interoperability between repositories.’

The winning team are past and present members of the JISC Preserv 2 project that is investigating the provision of preservation services for institutional repositories, and will take this work forward in the project.

A new book by two ECS academics considers the changes in our private and public lives that have been caused by pervasive computing and the Web.

In the book,'The Spy in the Coffee Machine (The end of privacy as we know it), the authors Dr Kieron O'Hara and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS consider our new state of global hypersurveillance. They suggest that as we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they?

Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, Dr O'Hara and Professor Shadbolt explore what — if anything — we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age.

The book is published by Oneworld Publications.