A series of lectures on superconductivity produced by the University of Cambridge includes a contribution by ECS Professor Jan Sykulski.
The lectures are available on video online and have been produced to celebrate the centenary of the discovery of superconductivity in 2011. They provide an introduction to the fundamental characteristics and theories of superconductivity. The BCS and Ginzburg-Landau theories are discussed for conventional superconductors, and more recent developments including theories of high temperature superconductivity are introduced. The critical parameters, flux pinning behaviour and characterisation techniques are also covered.
Professor Sykulski's contribution is based on the electrotechnology of motors and generators.
This year's International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI) will be held in Europe for the first time ever from 5 to 8 August.
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is to host the event, which will take place at the West Downs Campus in Winchester, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
`This is a critical time for Artificial Life,' said Dr Seth Bullock of ECS, the conference chair. `The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s.'
This year's conference has switched to a multi-track format, which has enabled almost 150 extra presentations. It has attracted hundreds of biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, social scientists and technologists from around the world, who will be hearing some of the latest research findings from areas such as artificial cells, the simulation of massive biological networks and exploiting biological phenomena such as slime moulds for computation and control.
Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, editor-in-chief of the journal Complexity, 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.
Professor Takashi Ikegami from the University of Tokyo will open the conference, speaking on work spanning self-organisation and autopoiesis in systems of birds, robots, children, flies, cells, and even oil droplets. The conference is unified by a focus on understanding the fundamental behavioural dynamics of embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.
'Alife is continuing to put new ideas into the common consciousness of scientists,' said Dr Bullock. 'It acts as a melting pot for rarefied specialist fields to come together to talk and learn from each other. This type of interdisciplinary exchange is critical to the development of scientists equipped for current challenges in understanding and managing complex adaptive systems such as ecologies, climate, the economy and the web. We at ECS are addressing this need through the development of new post-graduate training programmes and the creation of a new Chair in Biological Computing. Iâm sure that hosting ALIFE XI at this stage will be a real shot in the arm for UK Alife research.'
One of the conference presentations will describe a new program for automatically identifying spam emails that is inspired by the human immune system; another uses the techniques of artificial life to model the development of consciousness as a by-product of the way that various modules of the brain needed to communicate with each other. An experiment with robots will also be described in which they self-assemble into larger, more complex forms, where the individual units assigned roles to themselves dynamically without recourse to a top-level plan or blueprint.
The worldâs least expensive robots will also be demonstrated during the conference; constructed by undergraduate engineering students at the University of Southampton, the tiny robots learn from each other and work together as a swarm.
A series of press events will be hosted during ALIFE XI. Further details will be available early next week.
The ECS Learning Societies Lab has produced an innovative interactive video for undergraduate civil engineering students undertaking traffic surveys.
The video was produced in collaboration with the University's School of Civil Engineering and the Environment and the School of Psychology; team members on the project were Dr Tom Cherrett, Sarah Maynard, Dr Gary Wills, Dr Joe Price, and Dr Itiel Dror. The aim was to produce an interactive video for undergraduate civil engineering students showing the risks associated with filming traffic on a busy urban road. The video was filmed from the perspective of how not to undertake the fieldwork and was based on a well practised technique that employed for registration plate capture surveys over a number of years.
Once filming had been completed, a system was created to allow students to interact with the video by clicking on elements which they deemed to be a hazard and then ask them to explain the reasons why. A facility to store the student input was developed to allow the lecturer to view all the data allowing for customised feedback to each student.
The video was demonstrated to the EUNIS 2008 conference Aarhus, Denmark, last month, where it won second prize in the Dorup E-Learning Award. The LSL conference paper was entitled: 'Risk Assessment Education: Utilising Interactive Video for Teaching Health and Safety'.
Research into new types of solar cells produced by nanotechnology was described by Professor Darren Bagnall at the World Renewable Energy Conference in Glasgow.
Professor Bagnall and his Nano Group at School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) have conducted extensive research into how nanotechnologies can contribute to the creation of solar cells which can be manufactured on cheap flexible substrates rather than expensive silicon wafers by using nanoscale features that trap light.
Speaking in the conference session on Photovoltaic Technology, Professor Bagnall delivered a presentation entitled: Biomimetics and plasmonics: capturing all of the light. He described how his group has investigated biomimetic optical structures, which copy the nano structures seen in nature so that they can develop solar cells which allow efficient light-trapping. One type of structure is based on an anti-reflective technique exploited by moth eyes. Others are based on metallic nanoparticles that form plasmonic structures.
'It is essential that a solar cell absorbs all of the light that is available,' he said. 'Thicker devices absorb more light and unfortunately the need to use thick layers (particularly in the case of silicon) drives up the cost and often degrades the electronic properties of devices. Effective light-trapping will allow many alternatives and systems to be considered and will allow lower quality (cheaper) material.â
A new way to regulate the extent to which artificial agents rely on social learning will be discussed at the first European conference on Artificial Life, hosted by ECS next month.
Dieter Vanderelst, Rene Ahn and Emilia Barakova from Eindhoven University of Technology will present a paper entitled Simulated Trust: Towards robust social learning on Tuesday 5 August. They will describe how they have developed a mechanism which makes it possible for artificial agents to regulate their reliance on social learning.
According to the researchers, although social learning is a potentially powerful learning mechanism to use in artificial multi-agent systems, findings in the animal kingdom show that it is also possibly detrimental as it could lead to agents acting on second-hand information that might not be trustworthy.
The researchers' simulations have shown that this new proposed trust mechanism is effective in regulating the extent to which agents rely on social learning and causes considerable improvements in their learning rate. (A copy of the paper is available from Joyce Lewis at: j.k.lewis@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is hosting this year's conference, which will take place at the University of Winchester West Downs Campus, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
"This is a critical time for Artificial Life," said Dr Seth Bullock at ECS, the conference chair. "The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s."
Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, editor-in-chief of the journal Complexity, 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.
Professor Takashi Ikegami from the University of Tokyo will open the conference, speaking on work spanning self-organisation and autopoiesis in systems of birds, robots, children, flies, cells, and even oil droplets. The conference is unified by a focus on understanding the fundamental behavioural dynamics of embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.
Professor Wendy Hall received the honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Loughborough University at their 2008 graduation ceremony.
Professor of Computer Science and former Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Professor Hall received the Honorary Doctor of Science (Hon DSc)for her outstanding contributions to research in computer science and to leadership in science and technology.
Professor Hall has recently begun a two-year term of office as President of the Association for Computing Machinery, the first person from outside North America to hold this position. She is a founder director of the Web Science Research Initiative, along with Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel J Weitzner.
The use of artificial evolution to enable robots to assume roles will be described by researchers at the ALIFE conference in Winchester this week.
On Friday 8 August, a paper entitled Self-Assembly in Physical Autonomous Robots: the Evolutionary Robotics Approach will be presented. The researchers will describe a new approach to the design of homogenous neuro-controllers for self-assembly in physical autonomous robots in which no assumptions are made about how agents allocate roles.
The researchers will describe how artificial evolution is used to set the parameters of a dynamic neural network that when ported on two physical robots allows them to co-ordinate their actions in order to decide who will grip whom.
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is hosting this yearâs conference, which will take place at the University of Winchester West Downs Campus, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
`This is a critical time for Artificial Life,' said Dr Seth Bullock at ECS, the conference chairman. `The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s.'
Keynote speakers include internationally leading experts such as Professor Stuart Kauffman, author of The Origins of Order, Professor Peter Schuster, editor-in-chief of the journal Complexity, 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.
Professor Takashi Ikegami from the University of Tokyo will open the conference, speaking on work spanning self-organisation and autopoiesis in systems of birds, robots, children, flies, cells, and even oil droplets. The conference is unified by a focus on understanding the fundamental behavioural dynamics of embedded, embodied, evolving and adaptive systems.
Roke Manor Research Ltd is sponsoring a demonstration of robot technology on Wednesday at the International Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI).
ALIFE XI, hosted by the University of Southamptonâs School of Electronics and Computer Science, is being held at the University of Winchesterâs West Downs Campus from 5 to 8 August.
The Roke Robot Demonstration will take place on Wednesday 6 August at 5.30pm (with a press preview at 4.30pm). As well as sponsoring the event, Roke Manor Research Ltd, (a Siemens company; www.roke.co.uk) will also present some of their own latest technology, including DORA.
Robots at the Roke Robot Demonstration will be:
⢠Rokeâs robot DORA (demonstration of robot autonomy) - explores dull dark and dangerous environments. DORA represents a synthesis of Rokeâs expertise in autonomous systems, AI, sensor exploitation, vision systems, tracking and navigation and SLAM (Simultaneous location and mapping). Exploring potentially dangerous indoor environments is one of the most dangerous activities undertaken by military and emergency services personnel and Rokeâs research is leading the field. Exploiting Roke's feature-based structure-from-motion techniques, DORA builds up 3D information about objects and obstacles in its way. The current experimental system is entirely based on vision processing.
⢠A team of the worldâs cheapest swarm robots developed and built by a group of undergraduate students at the University of Southamptonâs School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). These robots can be produced for as little as £24 each and swarms of up to 500 robots are envisaged, which could have long-term applications in earthquake or disaster scenarios as well as space exploration.
⢠The 14-inch long Miuro robot from Tokyo-based venture ZMP Inc. twists and rolls to music from an iPod in an intricate dance based on complex mathematics. Developers say this technology will enable robots to move about spontaneously instead of following pre-programmed motions.
⢠Self-assembling robots controlled by evolved neural networks which dynamically assign their own roles in a team, from the Free University of Brussels (ULB).
⢠Some of the worldâs most advanced humanoid robots developed by Professor Ralf Der at the University of Leipzig.
A new low cost platform for swarm robotics research which makes it possible to produce robots for as little as £24 each will be presented at the conference on Artificial Life being held in Winchester.
The robots will be at a press preview of a special robot demonstration tomorrow, Wednesday 6 August at 4.30pm.
At a presentation entitled 'Strategies for maintaining large robot communities' today, Alexis Johnson from the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) described how he and his fellow students developed a platform of 25 robots capable of more than two hours of autonomy and with sufficient code capacity and processing power to run complex algorithms. The other students were Stephen English, Jeffrey Gough, Robert Spanton and Joanna Sun.
The team employed motors normally used to vibrate mobile phones. These motors are designed to be attached to circuit boards in the standard manufacturing process---removing the need for manual assembly of the robots and bringing the cost of a swarm of robots within reach of a typical research project.
'This is truly exciting: now we can order robots from the same UK companies that regularly make circuit boards for our projects---for them it is just a circuit board they can mass-produce like any other, but actually it is a complete functional robot,' said Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner who teaches Biorobotics at ECS.
'This also poses important research questions: how can we maintain and control thousands of robots,â he added. âThe students have made first steps to answer this using software tricks inspired by the way bacteria exchange code for drug resistance.'
Swarm robotics platforms are used for the investigation of emergent behaviour. They permit the study of swarm behaviour by physical simulation: providing real world constraints and experimental scope unattainable in software simulation alone.
Long-term possible applications for swarm robotics are in earthquake scenarios, environmental monitoring, and the field of space science.
An algorithm for spam recognition inspired by the immune system was presented by researchers at the first European conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE XI) held in Winchester from 5-8 August 2008.
Alaa Abi-Haidar and Luis Rocha from the Department of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA and the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal, presented a paper entitled Adaptive Spam Detection Inspired by the Immune System on Thursday 7 August. They described how in the same way as the vertebrate adaptive immune system learns to distinguish harmless from harmful substances, these principles can be applied to spam detection.
In their presentation, the authors claimed that this bio-inspired spam detection algorithm based on the cross-regulation model of T-cell dynamics, is equally as competitive as state-of-the-art spam binary classifiers and provides a deeper understanding of the behaviour of T-cell cross-regulation systems.
The newly-formed Science and Engineering of Natural Systems (SENSe) group within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is to host this yearâs conference, which will take place at the University of Winchester West Downs Campus, involving 250 participants and more paper presentations than ever before.
`This is a critical time for Artificial Life,' said Dr Seth Bullock at ECS, the conference chairman. `The field is on the verge of synthesising living cells, a feat that the Artificial Life community could only dream of when it started out in the late 80s.'