As it reaches its third birthday, the ECS Learning Societies Lab (LSL) has secured almost £1M of funding for projects which will greatly enhance student learning experience.

LSL has just been awarded £800,000 from the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) for projects to improve student assessment and to develop light-weight YouTube-type repositories with easier access for students. ‘As a university, we have a major interest in improving the e-learning environment and setting up systems so that students can have more access to materials from which they can learn more independently,’ said Dr Hugh Davis, who heads LSL.

'Today's students expect high-quality teaching,' said Dr Davis. 'As customers they expect to get their materials quickly and a YouTube-like repository is an easy way to access them.'

LSL has been developing light-weight repositories under the EdShare initiative, a resource for collaboration and sharing materials used in teaching and learning across the University.

Dr Davis and his team have also developed the Language Box, the first lightweight repository for language teachers in the UK.

The newly-funded e-Assessment in Higher Education (EASiHE) project will work towards accelerating the electronic assessment process and Dr Davis and his colleagues also contributed to the successful grant application for eAssignment System, a new process which will make it possible for students to get immediate feedback electronically when they submit assignments, which will be rolled out over the University as a whole this year.

Over 30 leading graduate recruiters will be attending the ECS Engineering and Technology Careers Fair on Wednesday 11 February.

Despite the economic downturn, competition among the country's leading technology companies to recruit highly skilled graduates is still hot, and Southampton students have a very strong reputation for the breadth and depth of their knowledge of different technologies, as well as for the strong mix of practical and theoretical understanding gained in their degree programmes.

The ECS Engineering and Technology Careers Fair was held for the first time in 2008, in response to demand for our students from business and industry. Over 1000 students attended last year's event, and so this year's Fair, on Wednesday 11 February, is already hotly anticipated.

The event takes place in the Garden Court, Students' Union, on the Highfield Campus, and is open to all students in the University, with a particular emphasis on engineering and science degrees. As well as graduate recruitment opportunities, the companies will also be offering summer internships and industrial placements. The company representatives will be available at their exhibition stands throughout the day, and there is also a special programme of presentations.

Companies attending include: aap3, Accenture, BAE Systems, Bloomberg, CapGemini, Corefiling, Detica, Dstl, Ericsson, Enterprise Recruitment, Factset, Fidessa, Graduate Jobs South, GRC Ltd, IBM, Imagination Technologies, JP Morgan, MatchTech, MBDA, Mendeley, NATS, Nokia, NDS, Network Rail, Parkair Systems, PPD, Qualcomm, Roke Manor Research, Schlumberger, Selex Galileo, Siemens, and STR.

for further information about the Fair contact Joyce Lewis.

See our video podcast of the 2008 Fair.

The Diversity in Engineering Campaign, being launched today (Thursday 15 January) by the Royal Academy of Engineering and led by Professor Dame Wendy Hall of ECS, aims to ensure that UK engineering blazes a trail to a diverse profession that will benefit from the skills of all sectors of society.

The Royal Academy of Engineering believes that many more engineers and scientists will be needed to provide the innovation needed to overcome the current economic recession, and recognizes that because of changes in the country’s demographics these engineers of the future will need to be drawn from different, non-traditional backgrounds, including:

•Women – who now make up over 45 per cent of the UK labour market, but make up fewer than 6 per cent of engineering professionals •Ethnic minorities – 80 per cent of the ethnic minority population in the UK is aged 16 to 35, providing a significantly increasing proportion of the workforce in the future •People with disabilities: around 18 per cent of the working population have a disability

Throughout her career Dame Wendy Hall has been a prominent and vocal advocate of women’s opportunities in science, engineering and technology: ‘It is vital for the UK that we recruit the brightest young people into engineering and science,’ she says, ‘including new talent from families and schools who might never have thought about engineering as a career.

‘The financial turmoil and the recession actually give us a huge opportunity to entice people who have studied engineering and science away from the City and back into innovating for the future, which is where they are badly needed.’

Dame Wendy will be speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London this evening (Thursday 15 January), when hers will be one of three portraits (right) of ‘Inspirational Women Engineers’ being presented to the Academy by the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET (science, engineering and Technology).

Web Science ’09, the first European conference on Web Science, is dedicated to the presentation of research into ‘Society on the Web’.

The conference will be held in Athens from 18 to 20 March 2009 and is organized by the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and the Foundation for the Hellenic World (FHW). It will bring together computer scientists and social scientists, and distinguished keynote speakers include Noshir Contractor, Joseph Sifakis and Tim Berners-Lee.

The World Wide Web does not exist without the participation of people and organizations; indeed significant proportions of people’s lives are now spent on-line in many countries. The Conference will address major issues of people’s behaviour and motivation on-line, their ability to trust websites or agents, their security and privacy. Crucially: how can the design of the Web of the future ensure that a system on which - as Tim Berners-Lee put it – democracy and commerce depends, remains 'stable and pro-human'?

In addition to the presented papers, on issues such as e-Commerce, Government and Political Life, Social Relationships, Cybercrime, Health, Culture Online, and e-Learning, the Conference will also include the Second Web Science Curriculum Workshop and a Workshop on Understanding the Impact of the Web on Scholarly Communication.

‘This Conference allows us to bring together two groups of researchers, from Computer Science and the Social Sciences, to explore the development of the Web across many different areas,’ said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, of WSRI. ‘This interdisciplinary endeavour, bringing together computer scientists and social scientists perhaps for the first time, is crucial to understanding both the human behaviour and technological design that shape the Web and its use.’

Web Science 09 will be held at The Theatron at the Hellenic Cosmos of the Foundation of the Hellenic World.

An ECS undergraduate project will be featured later this year on BBC's The One Show.

Presenter Miranda Krestovnikoff visited ECS to film a swarm of tiny robots, inspired by the behaviour of an ant community, which were designed and built as part of an undergraduate project by ECS Electronics students.

The robots have already attracted worldwide publicity after they were exhibited at the Artificial Life Conference in Winchester last August. They cost around £24 to make, so are some of the cheapest robots in the world, and are constructed from parts which are readily commercially available.

Rob Spanton and Jeff Gough, who graduated in July 2008 from ECS and who are now PhD students in the School, demonstrated the robots to Miranda, and explained how they worked together to complete a food-gathering task, communicating with each other used infrared technology.

The sequence will form part of a week-long series on The One Show focusing on biomimetics.

Professor Eric Zepler, the distinguished engineer who founded the University of Southampton's Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Radio Engineering in 1947, was also the UK's first Professor of Electronics.

To honour Zepler's achievements, and to celebrate the history of the School, ECS held the first event today in what will now become an annual series, taking place on Zepler's birthday 27 January. Before taking up his academic post Zepler was already known as one of the world's leading radio designers. His pioneering work on radio systems before the Second World War led to equipment that was used by the armed services of both Britain and Germany during the war. Less well known is Zepler's passion for composing chess problems, which led him to receive the title of International Master of Chess Composition.

On our first Zepler Day on Tuesday 27 January we exhibited two of Zepler's early radios - one built for Telefunken in Germany and the other for Marconi, designed after he came to Britain in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution. Both of these radios are in working order. Professor Greville Bloodworth, who worked with Zepler here in Southampton from 1959, was guest of honour at the event, which also included other retired members of staff who had worked with Zepler, and staff and students of the School. Professor Bloodworth has written: 'Eric Zepler was not only a great pioneering radio designer. In England he became a great teacher. After the experience of being his students or his colleagues, many of us have dealt with engineering design problems by saying to ourselves, consciously or subconsciously, "That can be calculated."'

Dr Thanassis Tiropanis, who joined the School's Learning Societies Lab last year, is interested in using the power of the Semantic Web to link virtual communities.

After undergraduate study in Greece, Dr Tiropanis moved to the UK where he did his PhD at University College London. He then returned to Athens and worked there for a number of years with Athens Information Technology, before deciding that he wanted to develop his knowledge and expertise in e-learning. 'I knew the Learning Societies Lab (LSL) at ECS could help me do that,' he says.

His work in LSL holds many challenges in education and research. For him, one of the greatest challenges lies in the fact that our work and personal spaces are merging and that information gathered in either world is often relevant to the other.

'When I come to work, I bring all my personality and my contacts,' he said. 'We cannot separate our worlds any longer, they are merging.'

For him, the challenge is how this merger between personal and work space can be managed effectively. He believes that the Semantic Web holds the answers and he plans to influence these developments.

Read more about Thanassis Tiropanis and about the Learning Societies Lab.

Profiles of many other researchers in ECS are available here.

This year's Part 3 undergraduate course on Multimedia Systems culminated with a very successful conference held at ECS this month.

The event was organised by the students themselves and was attended by undergraduates, postgraduates and members of the School's academic staff. As well as the opportunity to organise a conference, the event also enables the students to present the results of their research topics.

After a keynote from Dr Les Carr on the use of technology which asked if technology could be used to make people seem smarter ('Does my brain look big in this?'), student presentations included mobile web browsing in the future and an evaluation of Digital Rights Management techniques and effectiveness. During the afternoon there was also a poster session, with posters ranging from the advancement of digital military communication technology, to high definition video.

The conference was sponsored by JP Morgan Chase and Imagination Technologies and representatives of those companies provided demonstrations of latest technology.

'The Multimedia Conference is one of our most enjoyable student events,' said Dr David Millard, who teaches the course. 'It brings together the research and teaching aspects of the School and gives students the chance to participate in a real academic process. For many it is also the inspiration for postgraduate work and their first step to a career as a professional academic or researcher.'

Read more about the Multimedia Systems course.

A networking security tool developed in his Individual Research Project by an ECS undergraduate student was deployed last week at the Cisco Networkers Conference in Barcelona.

The tool, named RAMOND, improves the security and robustness of the IPv6 next-generation Internet Protocol, particularly on wireless networks such as that available at the Networkers conference.

As the availability of IPv4 address space continues to fall - with its exhaustion projected for 2011 - IPv6 will become increasingly important as the means to support a hugely increased number of Internet-connected devices. IPv6 also offers other potential advantages in areas such as autoconfiguration and mobility.

IPv6 autoconfiguration relies on special router advertisement messages on the network. Until stronger IPv6 security is more widely used, it is possible for 'rogue' router advertisements to cause problems for IPv6 devices connecting to networks. If not detected or suppressed, these rogue advertisements can cause laptops or PCs using IPv6 to become incorrectly configured and possibly be exposed to attack. James took an existing project called RAFIXD that was an initial attempt to counter this problem, he worked on the code to improve it, and then developed it into a new more flexible package called RAMOND.

RAMOND can now monitor multiple interfaces, react to multiple advertised- prefixes and is scriptable. It is Open Source, and available to download.

James’s IRP on RAMOND was supervised by Dr Tim Chown in ECS, who has led the School's interest in IPv6 research and deployment for over 10 years. He commented: 'James's IRP was excellent in that he researched IPv6 deployment issues, found a problem that needed an interim but immediate solution, and developed an open source package that did the job. Hopefully a lot of people will benefit from his work.'

ECS students undertake the Individual Research Project in the third year of their undergraduate degree. The project runs throughout the year, and comprises an engineering exercise in which there is scope for flair and originality. The end result will typically be some demonstrable software or hardware, together with a 10,000 word final report. The IRP is an essential component of all degree programmes in the School.

James graduated from ECS last year with an MEng degree Computer Engineering and is now working in the School on other IPv6 projects.

A pioneering stroke rehabilitation system developed by ECS academics has scored two successes: it will receive an award this week and has just received funding for further development.

According to Dr Chris Freeman from the ECS Electrical Power Engineering group, this research could mean that portable, affordable stroke rehabilitation equipment, which patients can use in their own homes, could be developed within five years.

On Thursday (5 February), Dr Freeman and the team will receive an award from the Institute of Measurement and Control (InStMC) for a paper on this system, at the same time as Dr Freeman is awarded a new £285,000 grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop the technology further.

The article, entitled 'An Experimental Facility for the Application of Iterative Learning Control as an Intervention Aid to Stroke Rehabilitation' was deemed the best article to appear in the InStMC journals throughout 2006 and 2007.

'This recognition and our new EPSRC grant are taking us closer to technology that people can use in their own homes. We are taking significant steps to making this a reality,’ said Dr Freeman.

This work builds on the system which was developed by researchers from the University’s School of Health Sciences and ECS to help stroke patients to re-learn movement. The system was trialled on a small group of patients in 2008 to establish its feasibility.

Working with stroke patients, the team applied electrical stimulation to contract appropriate muscles through electrodes attached to the skin which they found could be controlled to enable the patients to successfully perform tasks. They found that those trialled could track a moving target over a two-dimensional plane by moving their arm using a custom-made robotic workstation. The ultimate aim was that through repetition, voluntary movement would improve, thus gradually reducing the need for artificial stimulation.

‘As far as we know, up to now, nobody has tried using a technique called iterative learning control, to help people who have had a stroke to move again,’ said Dr Freeman. ‘This is a great example of how state of the art control theory, normally used for industrial robots, can be applied to challenges in rehabilitation.’

Now, the researchers are taking this research a stage further and plan over the two-year period of the EPSRC grant to expand these technologies to enable the stimulation of more muscles in the arm and hand and more flexible, functional tasks to be performed.

The award-winning paper is: ‘An Experimental Facility for the Application of Iterative Learning Control as an Intervention Aid to Stroke Rehabilitation’, Freeman, C. T., Hughes, A. M., Burridge, J. H., Chappell, P. H., Lewin, P. L. and Rogers, E. (2007) Measurement + Control: The Journal of the Institute of Measurement and Control, 40 (1). pp. 20-23. ISSN 0020-2940.