dr mc schraefel of ECS is working with researchers at MIT on a project that aims to see computers being as easy to use as Post-It notes.

We are all used to seeing office spaces adorned with sticky notes of all colours and illegibility, but the research team, led by David Karger of MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) and by mc schraefel of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group, wondered why the kinds of information-scraps which the notes were used for were staying on paper rather than making it into a computer.

As part of a long-term interaction between ECS and CSAIL, schraefel has been working with different research groups at MIT over recent years. She has supervised students at MIT and students from her research group in ECS have also been able to visit MIT. Among her collaborations is this study of how people use and store information scraps, undertaken with David Karger and his research students.

Researchers in the group, including PhD students Michael Bernstein and Max Van Kleek, undertook a study of the use of Post-Its in an office environment and came up with a number of reasons why the actual physical object of a sticky note would be preferable in certain contexts to a computer program. But they found that one of the main reasons for using Post-Its was ease of use and time taken to make the note.

'Too often the computer gets in the way of what a person wants to do', says Karger. 'That’s right', says schraefel; 'we can quickly jot "meeting at 5 with Max tues" on a Post-It and the job is done; the reminder there.

'But to do this same task on a computer means opening a program, filling in a bunch of fields in a form, navigating an interface to pick calendar dates or time ranges to make it easy for the computer to parse what we mean,' she explained.

'The cost of these actions can be perceived to be too high for the value of the note. So we don’t bother; we lose stuff. We want to eliminate that kind of interaction. Kill the form. Design software to support how we work, rather than have us continue to work for the computer.'

As a result, the researchers developed List.It, a lightweight application to do two jobs: to let people capture notes on a computer as effortlessly as writing a sticky note, and to let the researchers get a better understanding of how people take notes.

List.It is a start at a lightweight interface to capture notes. The next extension of this approach will be to let people use List.It to say things like 'Remind me about this paper the next time I’m with my boss' and have the computer bring up that document at the right time and place. 'We want to explore this kind of lightweight interaction as a way to get the computer to provide more support for less effort', said schraefel.

List.it is available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/listit/ (requires Firefox) and users are asked to send in their comments on the code after using it.

dr mc schraefel was recently awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering, sponsored by Microsoft Research, to improve the path to discovery for scientists.

Technology companies will employee graduates this year if they demonstrate exceptional technical and life skills, according to the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

Key recruiters of engineering and computer science graduates who are to attend a Careers Fair at ECS on Wednesday (11 February) say that despite a freeze on all other recruitment in their companies, they will continue to employ graduates this year if they demonstrate these skills.

When a selection of the 38 leading technology recruiters attending this week’s event were asked what they considered to be the top three skills needed by graduates in this economic climate, technical skills and aptitude were closely followed by communication skills and solid demonstrations of commitment and enthusiasm.

'Communications skills are surprisingly difficult to come across,' said Steve Williams, Development Group Manager of NDS, the market leader for single-platform pay-TV operations. 'Such skills are vital for companies operating across different time zones like NDS.'

There was also consensus that a university education alone would not be enough to guarantee employment.

'We need to see more work experience than a one-month internship,' said Jan Reichelt, Founder and Director of Mendeley, a company dedicated to managing and sharing research papers. 'We need evidence of project experience carried out in students’ own time such as software or web development. Pure university skills will not be sufficient to secure a position at Mendeley.' According to Louisa de Lange, Personnel Manager at Roke Manor Research Ltd (part of the Siemens group), only exceptional graduates will be employed this year and she advises early application.

'We are looking for the very best students. Our standards are very high and with fewer positions to fill this year, graduates will have to be exceptional to get a place,' she said. ‘I can’t emphasis enough how important it is for students to draw full attention to their core technical skills when applying – we are looking for truly brilliant engineers.’

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 from business and industry for ECS students. Over 1000 students attended last year's event.

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Contact Joyce Lewis for further information about this story.

Global aerospace and defence group BAE Systems has teamed up with leading universities in a £6m project aimed at developing technologies that will benefit the UK’s emergency services.

Jointly funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the five-year ALADDIN programme (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) involves scientists from BAE Systems and the universities of Southampton, Oxford, Bristol and Imperial College, London. They are developing techniques and technology to overcome the challenges facing different agencies involved in an emergency response.

Using technologies ranging from computer modeling to automated robots, the ALADDIN team has looked at how it can improve the understanding of constantly changing scenarios, where information is rapidly changing and often conflicting, to ensure a more effective response and improve the safety of men and women working in the 'danger zone'.

'We place great pride in developing and investing our skill base and inspiring the future generation through partnerships with educational establishments,' said Simon Case, from BAE Systems.

'The environments our emergency services work in are characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity, imprecision and bias. They involve multiple stakeholders with different aims and objectives and often limited and ever-changing levels of resource.'

'This is highly complex research of wide relevance,� adds Professor Nick Jennings from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is leading the research programme. 'To replicate the real-world scenario of an environmental disaster or a terrorist incident, we are taking a total systems view on information and knowledge fusion and considering the constant feedback that exists between sensing, decision-making and acting in such systems.'

The ALADDIN programme is scheduled to conclude its work in October 2010.

Further further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

The World Wide Web and its future development will be the focus of the first European conference on Web Science to be held in Athens from 18-20 March.

The theme of Web Science 09 is ‘Society on the Web’ and it is the first conference to bring computer scientists, many of whom are from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) together with social scientists so that they can explore together the human behaviour and technological design that shape the Web and its use.

The conference, which is organized by the Web Science Research Initiative and the Foundation for the Hellenic World (FHW), will also include distinguished keynote speakers such as Noshir Contractor, Joseph Sifakis, Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt.

Web Science acknowledges that 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 therefore 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 a keynote address, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at ECS and also Research Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), will assert that the Web is a huge powerful machine which is in need of further understanding – crucially as it moves towards a greater fulfilment of Web 2.0 technologies and the development of the Semantic Web. 'The Web connects humanity and can perform lots of initiatives that individuals alone couldn't do, from developing cures for cancer to decoding ancient manuscripts,' said Professor Shadbolt. 'Equally, it is powerful enough to crash an economic system.

‘The Semantic Web will move us into regions as yet unimagined – for example all the information that exists about me will be potentially accessible in just one 'Nigel Shadbolt' search.’

The Semantic Web – or Linked Data Web – will enable information to be gathered from distributed sources, in many different formats, and processed by machines.

‘The sheer abundance of information on the Web means that we will see the emergence of real serendipitous reuse of information – often in new and unexpected contexts,’ said Professor Shadbolt.

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

A press briefing about Web Science ’09 at which Professor Shadbolt and other key conference speakers will be present, will be held in London on Thursday 12 March.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

The Government's Minister for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, visited the School of Electronics and Computer Science today.

Lord Drayson was in Southampton for the historic meeting of the Cabinet in the City and was able to take the opportunity to visit the University after the Cabinet meeting was over.

In the new Mountbatten Building, a £100M investment in UK science and technology, he toured the clean rooms and labs with Professor Peter Ashburn and Professor David Payne and heard about the new equipment that will enable new research in nanotechnology and photonics.

Lord Drayson has a PhD in robotics, so he was especially interested in a display of student projects on robotics by Rob Spanton, Chris Cross and Adam Malpass, including the Formica swarm robots which were built in the Biologically Inspired Robotics course in Electronic Engineering, and the Student Robotics challenge, which students run in sixth form schools and colleges in Hampshire. He was also able to hear about Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner's research into biochips.

ECS was successful in being awarded two Doctoral Training Centres - in Complex Systems Simulation and in Web Science, and Lord Drayson heard more about these centres from Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Dr Seth Bullock.

In a session that included a number of students from science and engineering departments of the University, including Reena Pau, Adam Malpass, Chris Cross, Medhavi Kapil and David Reed from ECS, Lord Drayson was keen to find out about their inspiration in taking science and engineering at University and about their experiences at school.

'We were delighted to able to welcome Lord Drayson to ECS,' said Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Deputy Head of School for Research. 'He was clearly very impressed by the projects he saw here and the prospects for their successful future development.'

For more information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

A wider range of so-called ‘Assistive Technologies’ will be recognised as useful to all learners, including those with disabilities, as a result of an ECS research project.

Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science’s Learning Societies Lab, and Dr Jane Seale, from the School of Education, have been working on LexDis, a project which was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to assess some of the difficulties which arise in e-learning for disabled learners.

As a result of the findings from LexDis, further funding has been awarded to the team by the University of Southampton to continue working with students to explore the difficulties that can arise when working online, including the use of Web 2.0 services and applications.

More than 30 students participated in the LexDis project and fed back their strategies for accessing various technologies.

Some of the key recommendations from the project were:

• Improve and increase the availability of desktop personalisation so that students can log in with their own colour, font and accessibility options. • Increase the level of provision for online materials. This is vital for those who cannot handle paper based materials easily. • Increase the level of awareness for the use of alternative formats on the basis that even the most basic PDFs and PowerPoints can cause problems if they cannot be read on screen with speech output or accessed via the keyboard. • Design and develop learning opportunities and support systems that recognise the significant factors that influence disabled students’ use of technology – notably time.

‘Time is not on the disabled student’s side and indeed time is a real issue for every student, so there is a genuine need to keep technologies as simple as possible,’ said E.A. ‘We found it really useful that the students who took part in the LexDis project came up with new ideas for working with inaccessible resources and were often very innovative in the way they carried out research.

‘It is very important that we understand the difficulties that students encounter. Some of them, for example, have to take a PDF and change it into an alternative format to be able to annotate it or cope with diagrams. The knowledge that we have gained from these students is available on the website with guides and tips. It will also be used to look more in depth at the accessibility of Web 2.0 technologies.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

Dr Maurits de Planque of the Nano and SENSe research groups in ECS has been awarded funding of over £50,000 to investigate nanoparticles and to begin to develop new ways of determining their safety.

The grant comes from a special fund – Adventures in Research – established by the University of Southampton to help newly appointed staff at the beginning of their research careers. The funding will enable Dr de Planque and joint recipient of the award Dr Philip Williamson of the School of Biological Sciences to use specialized equipment to advance their research.

Nanoparticles are increasingly used to enhance the properties of a wide variety of materials, including consumer products such as sunscreen and cosmetics. They are also being developed for medical applications such as targeted drug delivery.

‘Given their increasing applications, it’s very important to be sure that nanoparticles are totally safe,’ says Dr de Planque.

‘Our current procedures for investigating their safety usually involve adding nanoparticles to cell cultures and monitoring what happens to the cells. However, the complexity of the procedures produces widely varying results, so that both acute toxicity and an absence of any harmful effect have been reported when testing the same substance.’

The researchers aim to look at simplified versions of cells - model membranes - and to compare the effect of nanospheres of different size and surface chemistry.

‘Model membranes are relatively easy to prepare but they mimic the barrier function of a real cell well enough for us to systematically investigate a large set of particles,’ says Dr de Planque. ‘The combined expertise and equipment in ECS and SBS will enable us to study when the nanospheres damage the model cells and when they have no adverse effect.

‘This will help us gain an understanding of how a parameter like nanoparticle size determines cellular interactions, which will aid in the future development of safe nanotechnology.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

The distinguished journalist Roger Highfield, Editor of New Scientist, will lecture on 'Science and the Media' at the University of Southampton on Wednesday 4 March in a prelude to National Science and Engineering Week.

Roger Highfield is one of the world's leading writers on science and technology. Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for 20 years, and now Editor of New Scientist, he has played a distinguished role in interpreting and explaining complex scientific developments to the public over a period when science and technology have developed beyond the grasp of lay audiences.

He is widely influential in his field and has broken many of the biggest science stories of recent years. He has strong scientific credentials, having read chemistry at Pembroke College, Oxford, and then continued his studies in a PhD on physical chemistry. As a post-doctoral researcher he also spent a short time in the Chemistry Department at Southampton before deciding to pursue a career in journalism.

The lecture has been organized by the School of Electronics and Computer Science for the Faculty of Engineering, Science, and Mathematics and underlines the University's commitment to ensuring public understanding of its research agenda. It is also a prelude to the University's events for National Science and Engineering Week 2009.

In his lecture Roger Highfield will be considering coverage of science and technology in our media. He will also discuss why particular stories gain coverage and how scientists can themselves play a role in influencing the news agenda.

This lecture is open to the public. All are welcome and no tickets are required. The lecture takes place in The Nightingale Building Lecture Theatre, University Road, Highfield, at 5 pm on Wednesday 4 March.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453

The University of Southampton announced this week that five members of ECS academic staff had received promotions.

It was announced that Dr Nic Green, Dr Alex Rogers and dr mc schraefel had been awarded Readerships in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and Dr Nick Harris and Dr David Millard had been awarded Senior Lectureships.

Dr Nic Green is a member of the School's Nano group and researches particularly in the areas of Bioelectronics and Microfluidics. His research involves the fundamental physics of the interaction of electric fields with microfluidic and biological systems, and the application of the technology to the development of chemical and medical analysis and diagnostic devices.

Dr Alex Rogers is a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) group and is interested in developing and applying agent-based algorithms and mechanisms for the control of decentralised systems; particularly decentralised information systems such as sensor networks. He works with ideas that lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence, data fusion, game theory and microeconomics.

dr mc schraefel is also a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group. Her main area of research is interaction and information systems design to support knowledge building in desktop, mobile and increasingly pervasive environments. She is interested in looking at how we can design tools to help connect information on massive information repositories like the Web to make better use of the information that's out there. dr schraefel currents holds a five-year Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Dr Nick Harris is a member of the Electronics Systems and Devices research group. His research interests include novel thick-film sensing materials, such as PZT and Terfenol, and associated applications - for example, the combination of silicon micromachining with thick film PZT to make microsystems such as pumps and acoustic separators.

Dr Dave Millard is now Senior Lecturer of Computer Science in the Learning Societies Lab group and is also associated with the IAM group. He has been involved in Hypertext and Web research for over ten years, firstly in the area of Open, Adaptive and Contextual hypermedia and more recently in the area of Web 2.0, Semantic Web, Knowledge and Narrative interfaces, and the impact of Web Literacy on e-learning and m-learning.

See also our academic profile pages.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. 023 8059 5453

A celebrity chef has been murdered – Who did it? How? and Why? - In an innovative and imaginative event for National Science and Engineering Week, schoolchildren in Southampton will be asked to solve the mystery.

‘Blood on the Kitchen Floor’ takes place at the University of Southampton’s Science and Engineering Day on Saturday 7 March, and has been devised by PhD student Reena Pau of the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

Working with professional actors from the University’s Nuffield Theatre and graduate students in science and engineering, Reena has planned a unique event which enables children to identify the murderer by solving ‘clues’ using technologies including robotics, lasers, DNA, lie detectors, and GPS.

The event begins with the children watching a humorous reconstruction of the events that led up to the murder, which takes place at a celebrity chefs’ competition. ‘The narrative is really funny,’ said Reena ‘but is intended to draw the children into the story and to give them a context for solving each of the clues.

‘As they work their way round the different technologies, analysing DNA samples or using robots to retrieve objects from forbidden places, they will be able to understand the potential and importance of engineering and science technologies.’

The inspiration for the event came from Reena’s work in schools. As part of her PhD project she has been interviewing children and finding out their views on computers and science. ‘I am really committed to ensuring that more girls enter careers in science and technology,’ she said. ‘But many children just don’t understand how technology can be used in the real world. Through merging the theatre and technology in this event we are providing a narrative which they can be part of as they use the technologies to come up with a result at the end.’

Blood on the Kitchen Floor takes place on Saturday 7 March at the University of Southampton’s Highfield Campus.

‘The event serves a dual purpose,’ says Reena. ‘The graduate students taking part have all received training in how to engage children in science. So as well as providing the opportunity to get more children involved and interested, we also have a group of people specially trained to do this.

‘It’s all about getting science out of the classroom and into the real world, where it belongs!’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.