The new Committee for the Electronics and Computer Science Society is bigger than ever, with new plans for future events.

The Electronics and Computer Science Society (ECSS) is supported by the School and is affiliated with the University Students' Union. It is sponsored by IBM. It exists to provide a range of events for students in the School, all of whom are members of the Society. A new Committee was voted in last week, and is already planning activities for next year. The Society organizes social events, academic and careers talks, sports and gaming events, and hosts events during JumpStart, the ECS Induction Week for Freshers.

The new Committee are: (l-r) Gamesmaster - Oliver Lea; Sports Representative - Raluca Alina Laic; Vice-President & Social Secretary - Connie Blacklock; Treasurer & Welfare Officer - Antony Johnston; President - Darius Aliabadi; Publicity Officer - Ash Browning; Academic Secretary - Oliver Bills; Secretary & Marketing Officer - Anna Asanowicz; Sport Representative - Oliver Parson; Webmaster - Steven Hatton-Pocklington.

The new President, Darius Aliabadi said: 'I plan to help build and maintain an ECSS community that everyone can feel comfortable to get involved with!'

New Social Secretary Connie Blacklock said that one of her aims is to get students from all the courses in the School together, and she is planning a number of socials with that in mind.

There are still events being planned for this year, including the annual 6-a-side Football Tournament. Find out more on the Society web pages.

Student Robotics have received the accolade of ‘Best Student-Led Project’ at this year’s Excellence in Volunteering Awards (EVAs) organized by the University of Southampton Students’ Union.

EVAs are awarded for projects in which University of Southampton students give their time to work with the local community. Chris Cross, President of Student Robotics, who received the award, said: ‘We are really proud to accept this award which reflects upon the hard work of many students over a number of years. With two successful competitions behind us, plans are already well under way to make Student Robotics 2010 the best yet!’

This year’s programme ended with an enthusiastically contested final on Sunday 19 April. Teams taking part came from St Anne's School Southampton, Brockenhurst College, Alton College, Peter Symonds College Winchester (which provided the winning team), and Bedales School. Sponsors this year were the Motorola Foundation, Bitbox, the University of Southampton and ECS.

The challenge had begun last September, when teams from sixth-form colleges and schools across Hampshire received their equipment from Student Robotics. They were then mentored weekly in class by a Southampton engineering student from the Student Robotics team. The University students, the majority of whom are from ECS, actually design, build and develop the electronics themselves the previous summer, ensuring that the college students have custom-hardware tailored to their precise needs.

The challenge for the college students is to build robots that are programmed to complete a task. To do this successfully they are encouraged to produce robots which are sophisticated, capable of programmed movement to perform set tasks, able to ‘see’, and make best use of their own artificial intelligence.

'The organization and running of this activity is carried out solely by our students themselves,' said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'We applaud their commitment to this event since it provides the sixth-form students with the chance to work on a real engineering problem, valuably supplementing their A level studies. It is an excellent example of outreach work in the community and I’m sure it will help inspire engineers of the future.’

In February this year, Lord Drayson, Minister for Science and Innovation, was particularly impressed by the Student Robotics project during his visit to the University (pictured).

Read Part 1 Electronics Engineering student Adam Malpass's account of the Student Robotics Final in his ECS blog.

Students wishing to find out more about taking part in Student Robotics should come along to the cake day on Wednesday 13 May.

MailScanner, the email security and anti-spam system developed and managed in ECS by Julian Field, now protects email in every country in the world.

Julian, Postmaster in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, began developing MailScanner in 2000 and now believes it is demonstrably the best email protection system in the world and the most widely used, protecting email for users in 226 countries.

'MailScanner now protects every country from the Vatican State to the United States, from North Korea to the South Pacific,’ he said.

Julian believes that MailScanner's success lies in its open source system which guarantees reliability, and the fact that its spam-handling technology is ahead of the competition.

He comments: ‘Our spam-handling features are much more flexible than other systems. Even if our system thinks a message is spam, it can still let it through but can wrap it up in another message so that if it is offensive, it won’t hit you in the face.’

The success of MailScanner can be judged from the fact that it is used in some of the world’s leading organizations, for example: the US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge universities, Vodafone Europe, Amnesty International, Friends Of The Earth and the British Antarctic Survey. The technology is fast becoming the standard email solution at many ISP sites for virus protection and spam filtering.

ECS comes in the top four in the UK for all its subject disciplines in The Guardian University Guide, published today (Tuesday 12 May).

The Guardian University Guide is particularly aimed at first-time students and concentrates heavily on teaching quality rankings and student satisfaction rather than research ratings.* Other elements used in constructing The Guardian rankings are employment prospects, spending per student and staff-student ratio – all aspects of student life which affect the quality of the student experience.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton comes third for Electronic and Electrical Engineering, after Glasgow and Edinburgh, and fourth in the UK for Computer Science and IT (after Oxford, St Andrews, and Cambridge). ECS scores well across the board, but receives particularly high ratings for job prospects, underlining the strength of its degree programmes and their appeal to graduate recruiters.

Dr Andrew Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School, commented: ‘These rankings confirm our long-standing position as the premier School in the country offering, as we do, degrees in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Engineering, Information Technology and Software Engineering.

‘The factors leading to this success are, I believe, are our hardworking, knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff and students, our leading-edge courses, and our excellent educational facilities. Our graduates are sought after by companies across a range of relevant engineering and technology sectors, and we are proud of their achievements not only in securing employment but also the contributions they make throughout their careers.’

The next University Open Day on 3 July provides the opportunity to see the School’s labs and teaching facilities, and to hear presentations on all our degree programmes, as well as to meet staff and students. Bookings are now open for the Open Day. There will also be further opportunities to visit the School during the September Open Days (4 and 5 September).

Find out more about student life in the School by reading our student blogs, and watching our video podcasts. All these are available on our Undergraduate Admissions web site, as well as full course listings and module information for all our courses.

*Find out more about ECS research rankings in the Research Assessment Exercise.

Dame Wendy Hall DBE, Professor of Computer Science in the University of Southampton, has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, it is announced today (Friday 15 May).

The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of science. Founded in 1660, the Royal Society will next year celebrate 350 years of promoting excellence in science and supporting scientific endeavour. Each year the Royal Society awards Fellowships to 44 of the best scientists in recognition of their scientific achievements. It is the highest accolade a scientist can have, short of a Nobel Prize.

Dame Wendy Hall is distinguished for her contributions to understanding the interactions of humans with large scale multimedia information systems. Her most recent work focuses on the development of a new field of Web Science focused on understanding and exploring the various influences - science, commerce, politics, and societal changes - which drive the evolution of the World Wide Web. Her research is aimed at both understanding the evolution of the Web and engineering its future.

She is particularly prominent as a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in SET and for the need to ensure that girls are equally included in participation in science and engineering careers.

She is currently President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first person from outside North America to hold this position; in the UK, she has served as Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and President of the British Computer Society. She is a member of the Prime Minster’s Council on Science and Technology and a member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. In 2006 she was one of the Founder Directors of the Web Science Research Initiative. She was created DBE (Dame Commander of the British Empire) in January 2009 for services to science and technology.

Dame Wendy commented: ‘This is the pinnacle of the academic career ladder for any scientist. As someone who has very much focussed on engineering and application building I never really thought that being made a Fellow of the Royal Society was something I could expect to achieve in my career.

‘So I am of course delighted that my research has been recognised in this way. It is also really important for the computing community that our field is increasingly being recognised for the significant role it plays at the forefront of science and engineering research today.’

In the Royal Society announcement today (15 May 2009), Sir Martin Rees, President of the Society, commented: ‘Our new Fellows are at the cutting edge of science worldwide. Their achievements represent the vast contribution science makes to society. They join an outstanding group of over 1400 Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, including more than 60 Nobel Laureates, putting them in the ranks of science’s greats.’

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

Valentin Muenzel, Part 2 student in Electromechanical Engineering, has been shortlisted for the Engineering Undergraduate of the Year Award, sponsored by TargetJobs and npower.

Valentin is one of 10 students to be on the shortlist for the Award for which the prize is £3000. He beat Engineering undergraduates from over 30 leading universities by taking part in a two-stage process. The first part involved an online technical test developed by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in which students' knowledge was assessed by a series of technical multiple choice questions followed by open questions looking at issues such as the future of power generation.

The best entrants were then invited to take part in stage two of the award - a structured telephone interview to assess softer skills such as communications. Valentin will attend the prestigious award-ceremony on Thursday 21 May at Grosvenor House in London, where the winner will be announced in front of an audience of 1000 people.

Chris Phillips, publishing director at Group GTI, the organisers of the TARGETjobs Awards, explains: 'This is an exciting new award category in the TARGETjobs Awards 2009 and is designed to find undergraduates who have that something extra – who are academically above average, natural problem-solvers and great communicators. The engineers of the future will be tackling some of the biggest challenges that society faces not least that of sustainable power. The new award is designed to celebrate the talent within this field, bring recognition to the skills needed to excel within the industry and to raise the profile of engineering careers amongst engineering students.'

The winner of the competition will be offered a job with npower. Bob Athwal, Head of graduate schemes at RWE npower is very proud about supporting the award and comments: 'At npower we are looking for the brightest engineering minds to help us meet future energy demands. This competition will allow us to help develop essential skills and competencies for the next generation of talent.'

For further information, contact

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The Mountbatten Building has received a prestigious award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

RIBA awards are made annually and are highly prized in the design and construction industry. The awards are given for buildings that have high architectural standards and make a substantial contribution to the local environment. The RIBA judges praised the Mountbatten Building's 'simple, dynamic forms', adding that the design allowed it to 'embody 21st century scientific research in a sustainable, academic setting.' The Building is also energy efficient, designed to consume 65 per cent less energy than similar complexes. The Mountbatten Building will now be short-listed for the RIBA Stirling Prize honouring the best new buildings in the country.

The Mountbatten Building houses the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre and research groups in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), providing one of Europe's leading multidisciplinary and state-of-the-art clean room complexes. It is a key element in maintaining the University's global reputation for world-leading research in nanotechnology and photonics.

Both inside and outside, with its laboratories, flexible teaching and research space, and impressively spacious atrium, the £55M Mountbatten Building makes a statement. The design is bold and modern, and the building's glass curtain walls - graced by the Peano-Gosper chiral fractal pattern - enable those outside to view the research taking place in the clean rooms. The Building was designed by Jestico + Whiles, the clean room designers and lead consultants were CH2M Hill IDC (UK) Ltd, and the structural engineer was Gifford.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, comments: 'The stunning design of the building matches our claim to be cutting-edge and state-of-the-art, and is a fitting home for the world-leading research it will facilitate.'

Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, adds: 'This magnificent clean room building is unique and world-leading in its imaginative vision for the integration of nanoscience, photonics and optical fibre technology.'

Another of the University's landmark buildings, the £18 million building that marks the entrance to the University's Highfield Campus and also houses three ECS research groups, has been short-listed for a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) award.

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

An innovative research project based in ECS has won a prestigious award in the world’s annual competition of high impact use of technology to support and enhance learning.

A Learning Impact Award was made to LexDis, a JISC-funded project which is assessing some of the difficulties which arise in e-learning for disabled learners. The award was made last week at Learning Impact 2009, the IMS Global Learning Consortium's annual conference which brings together the world's leading creators, vendors, users, and buyers of learning technology.

LexDis, which is led by 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, received a Best in Category award and was named Best Assistive Technology Network.

The Learning Impact Awards (LIAs) recognize the use of technology to improve learning across all education segments and in all regions of the world. The finalists were evaluated by an expert panel of judges and the attendees at the IMS annual Learning Impact conference and Summit on Global Learning Challenges, held this year in Barcelona.

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.+44(0)23 8059 5453

A new series of algorithms which enables computerised agents to haggle and to resolve conflict have been devised by a team led by Professor Nick Jennings.

Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), is lead author of a paper entitled 'Dialogue Games that agents play within a society' which has just been published in the June issue of 'Artificial Intelligence', the premier journal in its field.

In the paper, Professor Jennings and his co-authors describe how their work on developing autonomous computerised agents has progressed to a level where the agents can work autonomously through a mobile phone or a computer.

The new algorithms, which are the culmination of 10 years of research, will now make it possible for these software agents, which carry out tasks such as the organisation of a trip or social event, haggling or negotiating on eBay, to be developed to relate in real-life settings.

‘My view is that haggling will become very much the norm in all forms of on-line societies and that it is simply too costly and time-consuming to be done by humans,’ said Professor Jennings.

The academics have developed Argumentation-Based Negotiation (ABN) algorithms that provide agents with strategies to argue and resolve conflict in a multi-agent task allocation scenario. They also carried out experiments to ascertain the usefulness of argumentation for agents at various points in the negotiation process. ‘This work takes us much closer to having autonomous computerised agents which work on our behalf to plan social or business events,' said Professor Jennings. 'Through our earlier work we observed that when agents operate in a society with incomplete information and with diverse and conflicting influences, they may in certain cases lack the knowledge, motivation and/or capacity to abide by all their social influences. Our ABN system provides them with strategies to negotiate their social influences, thus enhancing their performance within a society.'

Co-authors of 'Dialogue Games that agents play within a society' are: Nishan Karunatillake, ECS, Dr Iyad Rahwan, British University in Dubai, Peter McBurney, University of Liverpool.

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

Dr Leslie Carr promoted EPrints as a practical solution for business management within US institutions when he spoke this week in Atlanta, USA.

Dr Carr, Technical Director of EPrints, the world’s leading software for producing open access institutional repositories, which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, explained the EPrints Services sustainability strategy at a panel session at the Open Repositories Conference 2009.

He also delivered a presentation entitled: 'From the Desktop to the Cloud: Leveraging Hybrid Storage Architectures in Your Repository' in which he presented a new hybrid model for managing information, which enables EPrints to provide practical, effective solutions for research data management throughout the whole business.

‘Open Access is becoming more prominent in the States now that Harvard has adopted an Open Access mandate,’ said Dr Carr. ‘We believe that there will now be more demand for repositories which provide a business service to the whole institution rather than just existing as library-oriented services.’

The School of Electronics and Computer Science leads the world in open access; its EPrints software is already used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

EPrints version 3.2 was also launched at the conference, with technical sessions describing the more than 25 improvements that are being added to its capabilities.

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