We look forward to welcoming prospective students to the School on Open Day 2009 on Friday 3 July.

We will be running different tours for each degree stream - Computer Science, Electronics, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering, and Information Technology in Organisations - as well as a session for parents and teachers. You can book a place on one of these tours on the University Open Day Web Site.

The four parallel tours will run concurrently four times during the day (starting at 10 am, 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm). You can of course book to go on more than one tour.

You will have the opportunity to hear about the content of our degree programmes, to see our labs and study facilities, and to meet some of our students and lecturers. The Open Day is a really useful opportunity to gauge the atmosphere of the School and University and to help you decide what kind of course you want to undertake. The University runs tours of many of the student facilities on campus, as well as some of the halls of residence.

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If you are unable to come to this event, there will also be Open Days held later in the year, on 5 and 6 September.

Two final-year MEng students at ECS have predicted that by 2014 solar cell electricity generation will be cheaper than conventional fossil fuel methods.

Sean Nuzum and Tim Davey, who both studied for the MEng in Electronic Engineering at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), based their final year projects on solar energy. Their work was supervised by Professor Darren Bagnall of the ECS Nano research group.

In a research project entitled 'Solar technology: Emerging markets and global economic forecasting, when should you go solar?', Sean predicts that due to the rate at which gas and electricity prices are soaring, and the rate at which photovoltaics is decreasing, it will be cheaper to use solar cells by 2014.

In order to make these cells more efficient than electricity, Tim proposes using devices based on amorphous silicon and develops a case for this in his research project entitled 'High efficiency a-Si thin-film multi-junction solar cells for the commercial market'.

'Silicon is plentiful and much less toxic than other materials used to make thin film solar cells,' he says, 'and can be deposited as thin film and stacked in such a way as to trap light, which increases the cells' efficiency possibly resulting in a cell which is 12 per cent efficient.’

Both researchers believe that it is time for consumers to think seriously about installing solar panels.

Sean believes that the most common argument against using them is the initial capital outlay needed. He said: 'The average system today in 2008 costs approximately £3,000 including grants, with a payback time of just six years, and this period will reduce significantly over the coming decade.

'The future is certainly bright for the photovoltaics industry and the time is right to go solar.'

As news of Tiger Woods' knee injury hits the headlines, an MEng student in ECS has developed a new self-powered sensor to monitor progress during knee operations.

As part of his final year project in his Masters degree in Electromechanical Engineering, which he studied at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Fauzan Baharudin explored the potential for the use of thick film technology in the development of medical sensors which could be embedded in the knee during surgery.

This new sensor, called Serial In-vivo Transducer (SIT), which uses thick film technology, could measure tendon force during Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) reconstruction.

The ACL is the most commonly injured ligament and is commonly damaged by athletes, in fact it is reported that this is the ligament associated with Tiger Woods’ injury.

Fauzan’s project was supervised by Professor Neil White at ECS, who, in 1991 developed thick film piezoelectric material which made it possible to produce a sensor which could power itself if it were installed in a device that vibrates and would be ideal for appliances where physical connections to the outside world were difficult. Professor White said: ‘Although this work is still in its infancy, our earlier research in thick-film sensors has shown that it is feasible to apply the technology to medical applications such as prosthetic hands. We have also shown that it is possible to harvest energy from the human body using piezoelectric materials and the knee is subjected to very high levels of force during everyday activities. It therefore seems logical to combine the two approaches to deliver a new type of embedded, self-powered sensor.

In Fauzan’s project entitled 'Assessing the use of thick-film technology in knee surgery: along with energy harvesting in-vivo', he has also incorporated some of this energy harvesting capability into SIT which means that it will be self-powered.

'I chose knee surgery because this has been very little research carried out in this field and I felt a self-powered device could work well in the knee,' he said.

Before developing SIT, Fauzan reviewed the existing devices in this field and concluded that due to its flexibility in fabrication, low capital cost, fast lead time and its suitability for use in the body, thick film technology is the best solution for ACL surgery. Assessment of the energy harvesting feature revealed that the device could produce more than enough energy to power itself.

'It remains a mystery to me, given how common knee injuries are among athletes, that devices like ours have not been developed before now,' said Fauzan. 'A sensible assumption for this is that thick film technology does not reach medical researchers as quickly as it does within the microelectronics community hence the delay in realising the huge potential in developing in vivo transducers.'

ECS engineers are developing the world’s smallest, high-performance and low-power sensor in silicon which will have applications in biosensing and environmental monitoring.

Professor Hiroshi Mizuta and his team at ECS are part of the three year European FP7-funded NEMSIC (Nano-electro-mechanical-system-integrated-circuits) project which will make these devices possible.

As well as being the smallest sensor on the market to date, it will have extreme sensitivity and very low power consumption. It will achieve this by co-integrating single-electron transistors (SETs) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS) on a common silicon technology platform.

‘Power consumption is a big issue at the moment as devices use current whether they are switched off and on,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The single-electron transistor combined with the NEM device technology reduces power consumption at both ON and OFF states of the sensor. Stand-by power is reduced to zero by having a complete sleep with the NEM switch when it is off.’

Professor Mizuta and his team will develop the single-electron transistor with a unique suspended silicon nanobridge which will work as an extremely sensitive detector for biological and chemical molecules. ‘This is the first time that anyone has combined these two nanotechnologies to develop a smart sensor,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The traditional CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) approach has many limitations so we needed to find a new approach.’

The sensing devices will need to be made to the nanoscale, which will be made possible by the new electron beam lithography machine which will be available in the new ECS Mountbatten building when it opens in a few months.

‘This sensor will be the smallest and use less power than any other on the market,’ said Professor Mizuta. ‘The fact that it will be at the nanoscale means that it will be able to detect either single-charge transfer and/or change in masses caused by a small amount of chemical and biological molecules electrically’.

NEMSIC is headed by Professor Adrian Ionescu of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and other partners are: Delft University of Technology, Stitching IMEC Nederland, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique – Laboratoire d’Electronique de la Technologie de l’Information, SCIPROM Sarl, Interuniversity Micro-electronics Center, Honeywell Romania SRL – Sensors Laboratory Bucharest, Université de Genève.

A paper by three members of the ECS Learning Societies Lab won the best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies in Spain last week.

The paper which won the award was authored by Asma Ounas, Hugh Davis and David Millard and entitled 'A Framework for Semantic Group Formation'. The award was announced and presented at IEEE ICALT 2008 held in Santander, Spain.

Fifteen members of LSL attended the conference, presenting two full papers, five short papers, and three posters, as well as participating in other conference activities and being represented on the Programme Committee by Su White.

BT has announced that it is to become a sponsor of the Web Science Research Initiative, founded by the ECS professors Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with Daniel J. Weitzner.

By attracting talented young people worldwide to study the economics, psychology, technology and sociology of the Web, WSRI aims to bring the study of Web Science into mainstream education. The initiative, which is jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and ECS at the University of Southampton, will bring together leading experts in the world of computer science and communications to create the curriculum for a new generation of Web scientists.

Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT, said: 'In the economy of the future, a nation's skills will form its critical competitive edge. By moving beyond the traditional fields of Computer Science and IT, the Web Science Research Initiative will equip young people with the skills to thrive in a world in which everyone is connected.'

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Professor at both MIT and Southampton said: 'I'm very happy that BT is imagining with us the incredible possibilities which exist in the future for humanity interconnected through the Web. An important role for our founding sponsors will be to help us develop new Web Science curricula to ensure that we are training future generations of web scientists to meet the needs of industry.'

WSRI will examine all areas of human interaction with the Web, from the social impact that has resulted from the growth of Web access to the potential of new technologies to expand the World Wide Web's boundaries and drive the social interactions of an increasingly interconnected world.

A new tool which makes it possible to extract information about an individual's health from genotypes in a fraction of a second, has been developed by an ECS academic.

In a paper entitled Boosting Haplotype Inference with Local Search, just published in Constraints: An International Journal, Professor Joao Marques-Silva, of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science, describes with collaborators a new approach to the process of inferring haplotype information from genotype data.

A haplotype can be defined as a group of alleles of one or more genes on a single chromosome that are closely enough linked to be inherited usually as a unit and a genotype refers to the combination of alleles inherited from both parents.

According to Professor Marques-Silva, the current method of extracting haplotypes from genotype data is based on statistical approaches, which can take a long time to compute.

Professor Marques-Silva and collaborators approached this scenario by taking the Haplotype Inference by Pure Parsimony (HIPP), a solution that minimises the total number of distinct haplotypes used, and developed new algorithms which they applied to achieve faster results.

'Biologists have been using these statistical approaches for a long time and may not be open to change,' he said. 'However, these methods can take days, even months to terminate, whereas our approach produces an almost instant result.'

Further research is being carried out currently by Professor Marques-Silva and collaborators to validate this new method and to prove that it could replace statistical methods in a number of settings.

'This is the biggest development that we have made in this field so far,' said Professor Marques-Silva. 'It remains to be seen whether biologists will use this instead of existing techniques.'

Today's Web will be seen as 'just the tip of the iceberg' compared to the potential power of the Semantic Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, ECS professor and WSRI founder, told the BBC Today programme.

Speaking to the Today programme on Wednesday 9 July, Sir Tim said: 'In the short term the possibilities of the Semantic Web won't be visible to the casual Web user,' he said, 'but as we start to write programmes that can access, share, and reuse data, we'll end up by making a very powerful system which when we look back we'll say that the original Web of data was just the tip of the iceberg.'

He continued: 'At the moment the data out there isn't in a form that we can process and use, so we're not using it powerfully enough.'

Drawing attention to the establishment of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term partnership between ECS at Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sir Tim advocated the need for further study of the Web by creative people from many disciplines.

Dr Richard Watson of ECS will explore the field of artificial life at the University's next Science Cafe event on Thursday 17 July.

Dr Watson will consider the area of artificial life which studies the evolution of artificial creature in computer models, and compare these simulations with our current understanding of evolution. His talk 'What we still don't know about evolution' will be followed by a question-and-answer session and an informal discussion of the issues.

The event takes place from 7pm to 8.45pm on Thursday 17 July at the Soul Cellar, 78 West Marlands Road, Southampton.

Richard comments: 'I will show some examples of artificial evolution simulations and artificial life creatures, and also illustrate current shortcomings in our understanding of how evolution works.

'I will also talk about the kind of mechanisms that my team in ECS has been working on to develop a more complete theory of evolution.'

Dr Watson is part of the ECS SENSe group (Science and Engineering of Natural Systems) which is next month hosting the first Artificial Life conference to be held in Europe. The event takes place in Winchester between 5 and 8 August.

The University's Science Café aims to show how science influences our modern world. The monthly events consist of short half-hour talks by world-leading scientists on their cutting-edge scientific research, followed by a question and answer session and a discussion of the science presented and its impact, in an informal and friendly atmosphere. The Science Café is free and no booking is necessary.

Around 250 ECS students will graduate at ceremonies being held at the Highfield Campus on Friday 18 July.

Students and their families will be coming from around the world to attend the graduation ceremonies and the ECS graduation receptions. The degrees to be awarded are BEng, BSc, MEng, MSc and PhD, in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology in Organisations, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, will be officiating at the ceremonies for the first time. He will tell the new graduates: 'In the standards you have set in your coursework and project work, your attendance at School events of all kinds, and your willingness to give up time to extend the School’s reputation in the University and among the local community, you have contributed to making ECS the distinctive and dynamic place that has shaped and will continue to shape generations of students.'

Degrees in Computer Science and ITO will be awarded in the morning ceremony at 9.30 in the Turner Sims Concert Hall. The reception afterwards will take place in The Piazza. Degrees in Electronic, Electrical and Electromechanical Engineering will be awarded in the afternoon ceremony at 4.45 in the Turner Sims, with the reception afterwards in The Garden Court.