Professor Nigel Shadbolt will be talking at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Digital Footprints.

The UK has one of the most advanced digital surveillance systems in the world providing the authorities and other institutions with large amounts of information about all our lives. Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampotn, will join systems engineer Martyn Thomas and Ed Gibson, Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft UK and former FBI special agent, to share inside information about how our everyday activities — from credit card spending to internet use — are monitored, recorded and used for anything from tracking international criminals to recording our complex shopping habits.

The event on Sunday 7 June takes place at 4.15pm in Cheltenham Town Hall as part of the Cheltenham Science Festival 09.

The winning team in this year's Software Design Group Project designed an imaginative application that enables tourists to explore Southampton's historic past.

The Software Design Group Project requires second-year Electronics students to produce a novel software application designed to run on an HP iPAQ. The Project is sponsored by Imagination Technologies, and the winning team members are awarded a PURE digital radio.

Working in teams over the second semester, the students have to produce an application which makes use of the built-in GPS, uses a database, has a clearly designed user interface, is coded in C#, and is designed for the Southampton area. The students produced a range of inventive applications, including lecture trackers, Freshers’ Friend guides to campus, and timetabling planners.

This year’s winners focused on Southampton’s historical past and produced an application called Lost in Time, an interactive historical tour of the city. Twelve historic sites in the city are covered in the tour. Designed to be used by tourists visiting Southampton’s city centre, the idea is that the GPS device would be lent out from the tourist information office in the city centre for a day. Alternatively a person could download the application to a personal digital assistant (PDA) or mobile device with GPS capabilities before visiting the city.

To meet the project requirements, the students decided the device should display a map of Southampton, showing the user’s current position and the location of the multiple historic sites within the city centre. Information for each site would be held on the device in the form of a database and displayed depending on the user’s location. Four display modes then enable the user to access information according to how they make the tour or where on the tour they happen to be, ensuring convenience and flexibility of access to the information.

The winning team were: Thomas Heslington, Kat Kirk, Jonathan Lamyman, Paolo Mennea, and Daniel Nevill.

Team Tarka, the first-ever UK entry in Solar Splash, the World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating, put up a spirited challenge, coming away with a string of awards and a very creditable 10th place in this year’s event.

Solar Splash took place over five days, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, ending yesterday (Sunday). Throughout the event different water-based competitions tested speed, manoeuvrability, endurance, design, and innovation. Tarka ended the event in 10th place, and won the Teamwork Award, the Sportsmanship Award, and achieved ‘Best Score for a Rookie Team’. The boat was placed third in the qualifying event and came joint first in the Silver Medal race. With a Union Jack flying from the boat and emblazoned on its prow, it wasn’t hard to spot Tarka amongst the other competitors.

Finishing in the top half of the teams is quite an achievement for the first attempt, and one that only began a few months ago. Dr Peter Wilson of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who is a Visiting Professor at the University of Arkansas, decided to enter a University team when he attended last year’s event. ‘Getting into the top ten was a dream this year, our first attempt, but I didn’t really dare to think we’d actually do it,’ he said. ‘The strength of some of the teams is just scary, but the best compliment paid to us was almost every team saying ‘We need to watch out for you guys next year!â€?.’

Peter enlisted postgraduate students largely drawn from the School of Electronics and Computer Science to build the boat and raise sponsorship for the trip, and despite the short timescale from when planning began earlier this year, the boat performed really well over the competition. Peter paid tribute to the team: ‘The final race was one of the best pieces of overall teamwork I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

Team members Dirk De Jager, Karim El-Shabrawy, Rich Bowen and Peter Wilson are now on their way back to the UK, and planning will soon begin for next year’s event, which will include undergraduate students in the team.

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, paid tribute to Team Tarka's hard work and commitment: ‘The team’s efforts and achievements demonstrate considerable engineering excellence in a multi-faceted task,’ he said. ‘We look forward to welcoming them back to the School and enjoying the party!’

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

A repository which will make it possible for colleges and individuals in the arts to store and present their work in a creative way will be unveiled tomorrow (Wednesday 3 June) at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.

Kultur, a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has used the world-leading EPrints software from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton to develop a joint pilot repository for the University of the Arts London, the University for the Creative Arts and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. The project will be officially completed tomorrow and an event to mark the occasion will be held at Whitechapel Art Gallery.

'Up to now, the focus of most repositories has been science and engineering and published articles,' said Dr Leslie Carr of ECS. 'Kultur has provided us with an opportunity to use EPrints to develop the first comprehensive institutional repository for the arts.'

The Kultur project provides a flexible, multimedia pilot repository capable of showcasing a wide range of outputs from digital versions of paintings, photography, film, graphic and textile design to records of performances, shows and installations.

The three institutions involved will now develop their own open repositories to store and showcase their creative work.

'This will make an immense difference to our institutions,' said Andrew Gray, Kultur Project Officer, University of the Arts London. 'It is the first repository of its kind in the arts world; there are others but there hasn't been a visual one. The benefit of Kultur is that it will enable us to share our practice-based research across our colleges and with other institutions.'

'It will also open up the art world, which will link up the often lone artist with the wider arts community,' Dr Carr added.

The pilot repository will be showcased at Whitechapel Art Gallery between 6-8pm on Wednesday 3 June. The event will include presentations from Andy McGregor, JISC, Seymour Roworth-Stokes, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research at the University for the Creative Arts, Andrew Carnie, Researcher at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, and Pat Christie, Director of Library and Learning Resources, University of the Arts London.

Kultur was a collaboration between all three arts institutions in partnership with the Visual Arts Data Service and EPrints.

EPrints software, developed in 2000 by the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, is used in hundreds of institutional repositories (IRs) around the world.

Images of the pilot repository are available at: http://www.eprints.org/kultur/FrontPage.png http://www.eprints.org/kultur/Hackney.pdf http://www.eprints.org/kultur/Hackney.pdf http://www.eprints.org/kultur/MiniFlux.pdf

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

The School has achieved further excellent rankings in university league tables, with the publication today (3 June) of The Times University Guide.

ECS comes second in the UK for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and fourth in the UK for Computer Science and IT, mirroring the rankings achieved last month in The Guardian University Guide. While The Guardian Guide is particularly aimed at first-time students and concentrates heavily on teaching quality rankings and student satisfaction rather than research ratings,* The Times Guide takes a broader view and looks also at the overall strengths of departments and their research rankings.

While the School warns against an over-reliance on league tables results, Dr Andy Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies in ECS, said that it was pleasing to see the School's very positive strengths endorsed by the league tables. 'These results are particularly encouraging for our students just about to graduate,' he said. 'They can see how highly their degrees are regarded, which is also very much endorsed by the number of companies who approach us looking for graduate recruits.'

Dr Gravell also looked forward to the University Open Day on 3 July when ECS will be providing a full range of tours, talks, and demonstrations for prospective students. 'The factors leading to our success are, I believe, our hardworking, knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff and students, our leading-edge courses, and our excellent educational facilities,' he said. 'We look forward to welcoming visitors at the Open Day, and have full programmes planned for our degrees in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Systems, Information Technology and Software Engineering.'

The University is holding three Open Days this year: Friday 3 July, Friday 4 September and Saturday 5 September. To book a place on the ECS programme, visit the University's Open Day web site.

The University of Southampton is ranked 15th equal in this year's Times Guide; see the Times Guide's description of the University.

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

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

With the announcement today (Wednesday 3 June) that University College London has just adopted the UK's 22nd (and the world's 84th) mandate to make all of its research output Open Access (by depositing it in UCL's Institutional Repository, UCL Eprints), it is clear that the United Kingdom continues to lead the world in Open Access.

With its 13 funder mandates and 9 institutional/departmental mandates so far, the UK still has the planet's highest proportion of Open Access Mandates. But the rest of the world is catching up (see Figure).

Dr Alma Swan of Key Perspectives and University of Southampton, has just documented how mandates to provide Open Access to research output have almost doubled globally in the year that has elapsed since Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted the world’s 44th Open Access mandate in May 2008.

The world's first Open Access mandate was adopted in 2002 by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). Southampton had previously designed, in 2000, the first free, Open Source software for creating Open Access Institutional Repositories, Eprints, now used the world over.

In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology (as urged by evidence provided by the University of Southampton and Loughborough University) recommended that “all UK higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online [and] that Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way.â€? Research Councils UK went on to make a clean sweep, with all seven councils mandating Open Access in 2006-8.

Professor Stevan Harnad, leader and archivangelist for the world-wide Open Access movement, and a Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, comments: 'Alma Swan's analysis shows that the UK is at last going to lose its lead, as the global growth spurt of mandates we had all been awaiting appears to have begun.

'The globalization of Open Access mandates is of course something that all UK universities heartily welcome as a win/win outcome, optimal and inevitable for research and researchers worldwide.

'Open access is essentially reciprocal. The only way every university on the planet can gain open access to the research output of every other university on the planet is by each providing open access to its own research output.’

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

Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been given a special role by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information.

Over the next six months, Sir Tim Berners-Lee will serve in an advisory capacity to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, and he will work with Professor Nigel Shadbolt to form a panel of technical and delivery experts to oversee the implementation of key recommendations, including overseeing the creation of a single online point of access for public UK datasets, and bringing forward specific proposals to implement and extend to the wider public sector the public sector information principle. The panel will also drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes, and work with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards.

The whole initiative will help drive culture change in Whitehall toward an assumption of total publication for anonymous data using open standards. It will also promote international liaison and global standards setting as an investment in future international data sharing.

The announcement of this new initiative was made in the House of Commons yesterday (Wednesday 9 June), by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as part of a wider statement on constitutional reform: 'So that Government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who led the creation of the World Wide Web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data on the Web over the coming months,' he said.

The new panel of experts will work closely with the recently-appointed Director for Digital Engagement and other officials in the Cabinet Office, the Office for Public Sector Information (part of The National Archives), and the Technology Strategy Board.

Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee are both Professors in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and founder directors of the Web Science Research Initiative. Professor Shadbolt was Director of the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) programme, a £7.5M project which was particularly influential in establishing the viability and value of web-based semantic technologies. He has recently been awarded a further £2.3m by the EPSRC to build on this work. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) began to explore the use of this approach within Government in a pilot project (AKTive PSI) which laid the foundation for this latest initiative.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been a strong proponent of better access to all forms of government data. Speaking in March to TED, he said: 'What you find if you deal with people in government departments is that they hug their database, hold it really close, so that they can build a beautiful website to present it.

'I would like to suggest: sure, make a beautiful website, but first, give us – all of us – the unadulterated data. We have to ask for raw data now.'

Nigel Shadbolt adds: 'The vision is that citizens, consumers and government can create, re-use and distribute public information in ways that add value, support transparency, facilitate new services and increase efficiency. We believe we can achieve this with the emergence of a new generation of Web techniques and standards.'

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

ECS postgraduate student Evangelos Mazomenos has been awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).

Evangelos is a member of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group, researching ‘Detection and Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks’. The Leslie H Paddle Scholarship which he has received from the IET recognizes postgraduate research which will further the art, science or practice of electronic or radio engineering. The Scholarship, which is worth £10,000, will fund the final year of his PhD.

Evangelos began his PhD research in October 2007, having undertaken his undergraduate degree at the University of Patras in Greece. His research interests are within the area of wireless sensor networks, and include target detection and tracking, statistical signal processing, wireless sensor networks for medical monitoring, and network architecture.

He is supervised by Dr Jeff Reeve and Professor Neil White, who commented: ‘The award of this prestigious IET scholarship is a tremendous achievement by Evans. It will allow him to advance his academic studies and also to liaise with other researchers working in his field.’

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

Hugh Davis, University Director of Education responsible for e-Learning, and Head of the Learning Societies Lab, has been awarded a Personal Chair in the University.

ECS celebrates another first with the appointment to a Professorship of Hugh Davis. Professor Davis is the first person in the University of Southampton to achieve the double distinction of being recognised by promotion to this level twice, for excellence in both Education and in Research.

Hugh has been the founding Head of Group for the Learning Societies Lab since 2004. 'My research is essentially multidisciplinary,' he says. 'This is reflected through the broad-ranging research interests of academics in our group, and our collaboration with many different academic schools across the University.

'We have worked hard as a team to establish our standing in the computer science research community,' he continued, 'and I am delighted that my research has been recognised in this way. I am particularly proud that I have now been promoted in both areas of my specialism. We have a strong ethos in ECS that values and promotes education and research; this reflects the University’s commitment to student-centred research-led teaching. For me, collaboration and teamwork is essential for success. I see this as well-deserved recognition for the hard work of all my colleagues and researchers across our research group.

'The way in which technologies impact on society, and particularly education, is an increasingly hot topic for public debate. Funding councils across the UK contribute to the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) which commits tens of millions of pounds annually to research, services and content to support education, and I have been fortunate in being closely involved in developing the strategic direction of this investment through my participation on the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee. I will now be investing energy into establishing technology-enhanced learning as a mainstream topic of study and research.'

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, commented: 'This is another first class achievement for ECS. Hugh has established and developed a thriving and dynamic research group at the same time that he has made significant contributions to the development of education agendas across the University. I heartily congratulate him on his success which reflects the equal value we place on research and education.'

Professor Davis became a University Director of Education in 2005. In 2005 he and a team of colleagues were awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s award for teaching and learning for innovations in the Computer Science Curriculum. Hugh is also chair of the University’s Wine Club and studying part-time for a Diploma in Wine, so he will no doubt be celebrating his promotion in style!

A portable test to enable fast scientific online assessment of hand function has just been launched by academics at the University of Southampton.

After several years' development, Dr Cheryl Metcalf of the University's School of Health Sciences, working with the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has launched SHAP, the Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure.

SHAP is a test which contains 26 activity tasks (such as opening jars and pouring from cartons) in order to enable an assessment of hand function.

The idea is that individuals can undertake the tasks in the test through the web site and use the online assessment tool to enter their times and receive an assessment of hand function.

'SHAP is providing a modern forum and a much more customer-focused way of approaching hand function assessment,’ said Dr Metcalf. 'This is the first test that has an interactive online presence which is easy to use and means that people don't have to study maths equations - they just enter their times and get their scores.’

The original SHAP kit was validated at the University in 2002. Originally developed to assess the effectiveness of upper limb prostheses, an area in which ECS has a strong research interest, the SHAP has now been applied to assessments of musculoskeletal and neurological impairment, with further trials expected on users of prosthetics in the next year.