Teams from local schools gathered at the University to bring their robots to life as the competition enters its final stages.

The Student Robotics challenge is a six-month long activity organized for sixth form schools and colleges by a dedicated team of students from the University of Southampton. This is the second year of the competition and its success has encouraged the formation of branches at other universities next year.

Teams who take part in the competition have to design, build and program an autonomous robot to compete against other teams in the finals. The Student Robotics mentors visit each team weekly and help to make this seemingly difficult task accessible and easy to school students in order to promote engineering, technology and science.

On 25 February teams from schools attended an Electronics Day at the University where their got to install the electronics on their robot and wrote some simple program to make them move! The electronics for the robots are designed by Student Robotics to be plug and play, but also to enable the students to be creative and try out their own ideas.

This year's final takes place at the University on 18 April and will be contested by teams from St Anne's School Southampton, Brockenhurst College, Alton College, Peter Symonds College Winchester, and Bedales School.

Student Robotics is sponsored by Motorola and the University of Southampton.

A new institute that will generate a community of researchers prepared to tackle some of the most pressing scientific and engineering challenges of the 21st century will be launched this month.

The Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) will launch on Wednesday 18 March at an event that will attract academics, industrialists and students.

The Institute spans a range of science and engineering Schools within the University and involves over 20 industrial and governmental partners. According to Dr Seth Bullock of ECS, Professor Jonathan Essex, and Dr Hans Fangohr, the Institute’s Directors, it will equip its graduates to carry out high-quality, sophisticated simulations in the context of live research challenges. Doctoral students will be trained to combine complex systems ideas with powerful computational tools in order to address challenges within key application domains spanning climate, pharma, biosciences, nanoscience, medical and chemical systems, transport, the environment, engineering and computing.

'We will shortly be seeing, or in some cases are already beginning to see, simulation modelling used to drive the design of new drugs tested on simulated organisms, to shape our response to climate change, to redesign our transport systems, and even to inform exit strategies from wars. The quality of these simulations is becoming crucial,' said Dr Bullock.

'At the moment, when the systems being modelled are increasingly complex, it is hard to know whether to trust some of the simulations that are being built. The ready availability of cheap computational power and the ease with which simulations can be constructed means that we will be seeing more and more of them. Over the next decade, our Institute will help create a generation of doctoral graduates equipped to act as research leaders in building and deploying credible complex systems simulation across a range of disciplines, from nanomachines to global ocean systems.’

The Science Minister, Lord Drayson, on a visit to the University last week also endorsed the Institute: 'Science will help us deal with some of the key challenges we face as a nation and a world,' he said. 'This is a great example of UK research helping to do just that in areas such as climate change, transport and drug design.’

The launch event will be held from 12.30-4pm at the University of Southampton's Nightingale Lecture Theatre (B67, 1027).

To register attendance, please contact: Dr Seth Bullock, Director of ICSS, Tel: 023 8059 5776, email: sgb@ecs.soton.ac.uk.

The £12m Institute is jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the University of Southampton and its partners.

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

Yellow ducks are usually everywhere to be seen in the postgraduate labs of two ECS research groups. But today they are behind bars, being held ransom for Comic Relief.

The mystery of the Lab ducks and their popularity is shrouded in ECS history. But they have become a very visible feature of the research bays of the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia group and the Learning Societies Lab. Until now they have cohabited very happily with the postgraduate researchers, but yesterday they were taken hostage and are currently being held to ransom until enough money has been contributed to Comic Relief to secure their freedom. Collections are being made throughout ECS.

Today, Friday 13 March, is Red Nose Day and many of the School's students and staff are supporting the event by doing something funny for money!. UPDATE: £258.26 was raised by ransoming the ducks, and from a collection in the Undergraduate Computing Lab, undertaken by Maggie Bond and Heather Doswell.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton is a large multidisciplinary and cosmopolitan community. We are committed to upholding diversity and opportunity throughout the School.

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

Speaking at Westminster this week, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warned of the potential dangers if companies are allowed to monitor individuals' searches of the Web.

'We use the internet without a thought that a third party would know what we have just clicked on," Sir Tim said, addressing a meeting of MPs, peers and technology professionals, organized by the All Parliamentary Group on Communications to address online privacy issues. Politicians and legislators are concerned about the potential risks from 'behavioural advertising' where Web users' searches are monitored and shared with companies.

Sir Tim was taking part in the meeting with Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. All three ECS professors are also Founder Directors of the Web Science Research Initiative.

Sir Tim said that people revealed very sensitive details about themselves while using the Web and their privacy must be preserved. 'What is at stake is the integrity of the Internet as a communications medium,' he said.

Professor Hall appealed to Parliament to protect internet users’ privacy. 'There are lots of good reasons why companies and government want access to our data but there are huge downsides to that,' she said. 'This debate is about our digital lives. It is about who we are, what we are interested in and what is private to us.'

Issues such as this will be discussed at Europe's first Web Science conference, taking place in Athens next week, from 18 to 20 March. 'Society On-line' is the theme of the conference which will bring together computer scientists and social scientists from around the world.

DATE (Design, Automation and Test in Europe) is a major global event which is set to shape the future of the worldwide electronics industry. Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton is this year's Conference Programme Chair.

This year's conference, DATE09 has joined forces with ARTEMISIA Association (founded to strengthen Europe's advanced research and technology position in embedded intelligence and systems), which could boost attendance to over 5,000 researchers, engineers, executives and policy-makers from industry, academia and public authorities.

There have been a record number of contributor submissions this year - up to 960, including a 30 per cent increase in papers in industrial applications. The programme consists of 77 technical sessions and over 20 panel discussions, featuring new research findings which will have a significant impact on the future of the electronics industry and academic research.

The conference will offer significant insights into the future of the electronics industry through keynotes by Mike Muller, Chief Technology Officer, ARM, and by 2007 Turing Award winner, Joseph Sifakis, Verimag Laboratory, Grenoble, which will be delivered at the conference opening session. Important topics such as the future of Field-programmable gate array (FPGA), programming of multiprocessor system-on-chip platforms and progress reports on the move to 32 nanometer CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor), will also be debated by leading researchers and developers and industry executives.

A unique feature of DATE is its commitment to linking new research findings to applications. Two conference days have been allocated to this aspect focusing on two major domains: system-on-chip design flows and methods, and multi-core architectures, programming and applications. The two special days will feature industrial panels and executive-level speakers from leading companies in these areas such as Intel, Qualcomm, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, IBM, NXP Semiconductors and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

'This is a real indication that the DATE conference is a truly global event and DATE09 promises to be the place for innovation and excellence. It will provide an outlook beyond the current market conditions providing a vibrant meeting place where start-up companies, large system houses and researchers can exchange ideas and promote innovation and growth’, said Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, who heads the ECS Pervasive Systems Centre. Professor Al-Hashimi has recently been confirmed as the General Chair of DATE11.

DATE09 begins on Monday 20 April with one full day of tutorials and ends on Friday 24 April with eight workshops on current and emerging issues in design, test, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) and software.

It will take place at the Acropolis, Nice, France from 20-24 April 2009.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Although the images were captured while the new Mountbatten Building was still (though not for much longer) under construction, Google Streetview provides an excellent tour around the ECS buildings on the University of Southampton Highfield Campus.

The tour begins from the Mountbatten Building on Salisbury Road. The Building is a £100M investment in UK science and technology and contains the latest clean room technology for silicon fabrication and nanotechnology. It is one of the UK's leading research facilities and provides clean room and lab space for researchers in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, the ECS Nano group and Communications group. Researchers in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering group are also based in the building, along with researchers from the Optoelectronics Research Centre, which shares the technical facilities with ECS.

Walking east along Salisbury Road, you will pass Zepler Building, which is where our undergraduate students spend much of their time. You can walk by the two buildings at the corner of University Road and Burgess Road which house our ISIS, SENSe and EPE research groups, covering Information: Signals, Images and Systems, the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems, and Electrical Power Engineering. Also in view on the left as you turn right into University Road is the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory, one of only a handful in the UK which are equipped to carry out high-level testing and monitoring of electrical equipment. On the east of University Road as you walk towards the centre of campus you will pass a glass-fronted building which houses three research groups: Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia; Learning Societies Lab; and the Web Science Research Initiative.

ECS is fortunate that its buildings are grouped together and are also very close to the centre of the campus which contains all the facilities needed for student life in Southampton. As you carry on down University Road you will pass the University Library on your left, and the Students Union and Jubilee Sports Centre on your right. The Highfield Campus is only a short bus-ride from the centre of Southampton and many of the students live in Portswood, which has a wide variety of shops, as well as being only a 10-minute walk from the centre of the city.

Commenting on the technological achievement of Google Streetview, Chris Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, said: 'We are aware of the privacy and security concerns that have been raised by the advent in the UK of Google Streetview, but as computer scientists we can't help admiring the technology - it is very very cool!'

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

A major report published today calls for universities and employers to give more priority to ensuring students’ employability skills and industrial experience – areas where ECS is already receiving highly positive feedback from graduate employers.

Launching the report in London this morning (26 March) Future Fit: Preparing graduates for the world of work, (pdf) CBI Director-General Richard Lambert highlighted the importance employers place on ‘employability’ skills – such as self-management, team-working, customer awareness and problem solving – when recruiting graduates. He urged students to gain these vital employability skills and experience of the workplace while at university, so they are better equipped to compete in the increasingly tough jobs market after graduation.

‘Of course businesses don’t expect graduates to arrive on day one fully trained,’ he said, ‘but what they do value in graduates are their people skills, a focus on the customer and a keenness to solve problems. It’s no good graduates regretting not taking up opportunities once they leave university – many universities are keen to help them gain work experience during their degree.’

In the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton the undergraduate degree programmes are designed to ensure that students undertake a range of projects as part of their coursework. This helps them acquire valuable skills including: team-work, project planning, time management, working to a brief, and communication and presentation skills. The projects culminate in the fourth year of the Master of Engineering degrees when students undertake a challenging Group Design Project over three months, where they are tasked to provide the solution to a real industrial problem for an exacting client such as Detica, Roke Manor Research, Nokia, Imagination Technologies, and IBM.

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

Students in ECS are also encouraged to take summer internships and 12-month industrial placements and they benefit from a strong interest from leading high-tech companies who are keen to recruit them both for short-term placements and graduate positions.

Professor Alun Vaughan, Deputy Head of School for Education, strongly endorses the CBI view: ‘It is a difficult job market at the moment,’ he said, ‘but we believe that the skills our students gain during their degree programmes will give them a real advantage. Employers are looking for more than just wide-ranging technical knowledge – they are looking for the ability to understand problems in the context of business, and the skills and determination to work individually or as part of a team to get the best result.

‘We not only help ensure that our students have these skills when they graduate but we also encourage students to take industrial placements where possible, which add to their understanding of how the technology they are learning is used in the workplace.’

James Snowdon, a final-year student in Electronic Engineering, spent last summer working in London for Goldman Sachs, providing support to one of their trading teams. ‘I could see the importance of the systems I was developing since they helped the traders to make money!,’ he said. ‘I also gained greater professional awareness which helped increase my confidence in dealing with customers.’ When he graduates this summer James will be joining CapGemini’s graduate programme .

In addition to providing the kinds of degree programmes that are highly valued by graduate employers, ECS also works closely with employers to ensure that its students have excellent opportunities to gain placements and graduate positions. Our ECS Careers Hub web site has affiliates from UK and global high-tech companies and students are encouraged to begin thinking about their future careers from early in the first year of their degrees.

‘We really want to see our students make an impact in the workplace when they graduate,’ said Professor Vaughan. ‘We provide them with the skills with which they can succeed. We want to see those skills put to best use in business and industry.’

A new award from the Engineering and Technology Board for the UK's 'Best Engineering Event' during National Science and Engineering Week has been won by the University of Southampton.

As always the School of Electronics and Computer Science played a significant part in the success of the Science and Engineering Day, which was held this year at Garden Court on the Highfield Campus.

A large number of ECS students, led by Dr Denis Nicole, organized activities that enabled visiting children and their parents to explore robots, make an enhanced reality model, use electronic kits to build radios, make solar-power boats, or design their own computer games. All these activities were popular throughout the day and enabled the children to really try their hand at the activities on offer.

Probably the most imaginative and innovative event held during the day was ‘Blood on the Kitchen Floor’, a murder mystery event devised by ECS PhD student Reena Pau. This was a completely new kind of event for the University’s Science and Engineering Day in which children and their families watched the reconstruction of the murder of a famous chef, scripted and acted by the Nuffield Theatre, before visiting labs in many different University Schools to solve clues to the murderer’s identity using lasers, lie detection, GPS, robots, and DNA analysis.

Postgraduate students in the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Mathematics took part at each of the locations and had been specially trained in how to engage the children and present the activities in the context of the narrative.

Blood on the Kitchen Floor was one of the most popular events on the day, with all three sessions fully booked at an early stage. Around 300 people took part and were very enthusiastic about the staging of the event, and the chance to see real engineering and science in action in the University’s labs.

'The murder mystery is a way of putting science into context,’ says Reena Pau. ‘By making kids real investigators in their own drama, they and their families begin to understand how science can be used in day-to-day life.

‘Our own group in ECS demonstrated robotics, where participants had to navigate a robot round a room to pick up a contaminated phone. It’s all about taking science out of the classroom and into real life - which is where it belongs.’

Other engineering activities were provided by the School of Engineering Sciences, the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment, and the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.

The national award is intended to encourage imaginative and inspiring activities and entries were judged according to the following criteria: their effective communication of engineering principles; their innovative and engaging presentation of science and engineering; and their effective self evaluation.

Paul Jackson, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Technology Board, said: "The ETB is delighted to award the University of Southampton the National Science and Engineering Week (NSEW) prize for Best Engineering Event. We congratulate them for entertaining and informing children, students and parents alike in the wonders of engineering.’

ECS has had a long commitment to the UK’s national week of science celebrations, beginning in 1992 when the event was first held on the University campus. Dennis Nicole said: ‘For me, the excitement of these events is seeing children experience the same joy of making things that work---from computer games to "lie detectors" via solar-powered boats and seeing robots---that inspired me into a career in engineering.’

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

An ECS PhD student has received a prestigious Fellowship award from the Schlumberger Foundation.

Betty Purwandari who is studying for a PhD in the IAM group (Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia), has become a Fellow of the Faculty of the Future and awarded a grant of up to $50,000 to continue her research.

The funding will help advance Betty’s research on the impact of the mobile web in rural areas of the developing world. ‘I am fortunate to be supervised by Professor Wendy Hall and by Professor David De Roure,’ said Betty. ‘This makes it possible for me to work with the Web Science Research Initiative, and with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Mobile Web for Social Development. This, together with the award of the Schlumberger Foundation Fellowship, ensures that I am part of an international network of co-operation, working together to empower the mobile web to help less fortunate people in the world’s developing countries.’ The Faculty for the Future awards are open to women academics in science and engineering from developing and emerging countries, and provide funding for advanced graduate study. The long-term goal is to support role models and improve gender balance at the faculty level so that more young women are attracted to scientific disciplines. Grant recipients are, therefore, expected to return to their home countries at the end of their studies to continue their academic careers.

‘Back home I work at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Indonesia,’ said Betty. ‘I hope that my experience gained in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, including my involvement with ECSWomen, can inspire more females in Indonesia to pursue study and careers in science and technology.’

Professor Dame Wendy Hall said: 'This is a fantastic award - both for Betty herself, and for the School of Electronics and Computer Science. Betty's research project and her own individual commitments to applying her research to an important area of development and to acting as a strong role model herself, exemplify aspects of the our own activities in ECS that we believe are particularly important for the future.'

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

The extraordinary technology in the new Southampton Nanofabrication Centre is demonstrated in this image of tungsten atoms - the group of three atoms in the centre of the image is close to being 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.

The image was obtained this week during the commissioning in the new Mountbatten Building cleanroom of the ORION™helium-ion microscope. The ORION™ is the only one of its kind in the UK. Developed and provided by Carl Zeiss SMT, ORION™is pushing scanning beam technologies beyond current limits – in November 2008 it achieved a record 0.24nm resolution, close to the diameter of a single atom.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was instrumental in bringing this new technology to the Mountbatten Building. He says: 'What can be seen here is an an array of tungsten atoms. Each "fuzzy dot" is a single atom – in the centre of the image is the tip of a needle so sharp it has just three atoms on its tip, surrounded by a slightly irregular hexagon of six, with three arrays of six more further out on the sides of the needle.

'This illustrates graphically how tiny our world can be,' he says. 'The conditions needed to make these images need to be stable, vibration-free and clean. A speck of dust is tens of thousands of times bigger than what can be seen here. Vibration utterly imperceptible to a person would destroy the image, like a blurred image from a shaking camera, but millions of times more sensitive. This is, in one sense, the ultimate limit of the nano world – you can’t go smaller than an atom.'

According to Carl Zeiss SMT, this new microscope is capable of providing images of unrivalled high resolution, surface information and material contrast, unachievable with any other microscopy instrument available today and paving the way for a new era in sub-nanometer, ultra-high resolution scanning microscopy.

The ORION™ scanning ion microscope uses a beam of Helium ions — rather than electrons typically used in scanning electron microscopes (SEM) — to image and measure. Since Helium ions can be focused into a substantially smaller probe size and provide a much smaller sample interaction compared to electrons, the ORION™ system can generate higher resolution images with greatly improved material contrast at a substantially extended depth of focus.

The ongoing shrinkage of feature sizes of semiconductor devices makes extreme high resolution microscopy mandatory. 'Some layers of integrated circuits already have reached a thickness of only a few atoms,' Dr Rainer Knippelmeyer, Senior Vice President Operations of Carl Zeiss SMT explained last November. 'Semiconductor manufacturers are in dire need of reliable high-resolution, surface sensitive metrology and process control tools. With the ORION™ helium-ion microscope we offer exactly the tool the industry and nanotechnology research needs and we continue to keep pace with the industry’s rapidly changing requirements.’

The secret behind the extreme high resolution of the helium-ion microscope lies in the proprietary source technology and in the interaction between the scanning ion beam and the surface of the specimen. The source of the microscope is very small and the helium ions emanate from a region as small as a single atom. Unlike electrons, the helium ions have a very small wavelength and hence do not suffer appreciably from adverse diffraction effects – a law of physics which fundamentally limits the imaging resolution of electrons. Also, the helium ion beam triggers signals directly from the surface of the sample and stays very collimated upon entering the sample. This results in very sharp and surface sensitive images at the quoted resolution which can be easily interpreted. In contrast, for a typical SEM, the majority of the secondary electrons that are used for imaging come from deeper and much less confined regions within the sample, creating blurrier images with less resolution than the ORION helium-ion microscope.

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