Over 150 final-year students received their degree results today, the culmination of three or four years intensive undergraduate study.

Results were published shortly after midday in Zepler Building Foyer, to an expectant crowd of students. The results of 20 different degree streams were announced today, with a particularly large number of First Class Honours degrees awarded to this year's Electronic Engineering class.

Read James Snowdon's blog to get the flavour of results day in the School.

Graduation ceremonies will take place at the University on Friday 17 July.

Synote, a web-based annotation tool developed in ECS by a team led by Dr Mike Wald, has been shortlisted for the EUNIS Dørup E-learning Award 2009.

Synote makes multimedia resources easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users through the creation of notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of the recording.

Although multimedia has become technically easier to create (e.g. recording lectures) and users can easily bookmark, search, link to, or tag the WHOLE of a podcast or video recording available on the web, without Synote they cannot easily find or associate their notes or resources with PART of that recording. As an analogy, users would clearly find a text book difficult to use if it had no contents page, index or page numbers.

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. Synote enables learners or teachers to read and search text transcripts and slides and replay recordings to support learning style preference, deafness, disability or English as a second language; to bookmark, tag and highlight and link to or from sections of recordings for indexing, revision, clarification or feedback; and to collaboratively annotate recordings with notes and URLs of related resources.

Synote is freely available for anyone to use and can play most audio and video formats on most browsers and computers. Evaluations have shown that students like using Synote, find the synchronised transcripts and note-taking facility useful and want more recordings and lectures to be available in this way.

Synote has been developed with the support of JISC and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

Dr Wald has been invited to demonstrate Synote at the EUNIS 2009 conference hosted by the University of Santiago de Compostela 23-26 June.

The concept of the humanities and technology working closer together will be endorsed by Professor Dame Wendy Hall FRS at an international symposium at the University of Southampton next month.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will deliver a keynote at InterFace, a symposium that will consider cross-fertilisation in both directions between technology and the humanities.

InterFace, which takes place on 9 and 10 July, will continue a tradition at the University of Southampton of interaction between technology and the humanities, and establish new ways for the disciplines to develop more initiatives together.

'Throughout my career, I have had the pleasure to work at the interface of the humanities and technology,' said Professor Dame Wendy Hall. 'In fact, working with researchers from the humanities was a major inspiration for the design of our Microcosm hypermedia system in the pre-Web days. I am delighted that the InterFace conference at Southampton is recognising the significance of interdisciplinary research between these two communities.'

The theme which underlies InterFace generally is how society and technology influence each other.

Issues to be addressed under this theme are the convergence of technologies such as phones, computers and cameras; social networking and privacy; how students use technology; and the exclusion of elderly people from web sites due to their inability to embrace the technology.

One-third of the submissions to be presented in Lightning Talks and poster sessions are from an international audience, reflected by discussions on machine translations for the Classics and the difficulties of switching alphabets, both of which challenge the Anglo-centricity of the World Wide Web.

'The fact that we have themes like this from an international audience indicates that we really need to seriously consider how all of this technology and information is used on a global level,' said Leif Isaksen of ECS, one of the conference organisers.

Another prominent theme is hypermedia technology for traditional media, which looks at the technology needed to read ancient manuscripts, with a novel idea being the possibility of digitizing all the surviving materials for the early Gospel of St John in Latin.

The conference reception on Thursday evening will be held at the John Hansard Gallery on the Highfield Campus.

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

Around 500 visitors will be welcomed to the School of Electronics and Computer Science during the University Open Day on Friday 3 July.

The School is holding a day of tours, presentations, demonstrations and drop-in sessions, highlighting the opportunities available on our degree programmes, and emphasizing the unique character of the School. Visitors will have the chance to see all our undergraduate labs, and to meet past and current students, as well as to find out about our students' excellent career prospects.

Presentations begin at 10 am with a welcome from the Deputy Head of School (Education), Professor Alun Vaughan; there will then be separate tours and presentations for Computer Science & Software Engineering; Electrical & Electromechanical Engineering; Electronic Engineering; and Information Technology in Organisations. These presentations and tours are repeated at 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm.

Between 12 noon and 2 pm the School will be holding a drop-in session in the Mountbatten Building, where visitors can see demonstrations, tour the labs with our students, see videos of our Careers Fair and student project work, watch our swarm robots in action, and find out more from ECS Admissions Tutors. Refreshments will be available; there is no need to book for this part of the event.

'Visiting universities is extremely important in enabling students to find the best place for their study,' said Professor Alun Vaughan. 'There are many factors which make a difference to the kind of educational experience that will suit a particular student and we urge prospective students to take advantage of these visit days to find out as much as they can about what we can offer them.'

ECS Open Day Hotline: +44(0)23 8059 4506

Further University of Southampton Open Days will be held on Friday 4 and Friday 5 September; places can be booked on the University Open Day web site.

View our Introduction to ECS Open Days by Professor Alun Vaughan.

The School’s new undergraduate brochure highlights the link between ECS undergraduate project work and the excellent careers prospects for our graduates.

Published to coincide with the University’s Open Day on Friday 3 July, the new brochure 'Create your Future@ECS, Undergraduate Degree Programmes 2010' takes the theme ‘A great study experience … leading to a great future’. Explaining the strength of our undergraduate degrees through the wide range of choices in the degree programme syllabuses, and the opportunities for personal development and achievement in our extensive project work, the brochure underlines the reasons why ECS graduates are in so much demand from employers.

Research in the School is also showcased in the brochure, with some of our recent media coverage highlighting the breadth and relevance of activities in the School.

The brochure contains syllabus and module lists for all our degree streams, and includes features on our facilities, our student societies, and our student bloggers, with a specially written article by James Snowdon on how to get the best out of university.

Read the pdf version or request a copy of the brochure.

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

Synote, an innovative Web-based annotation tool developed in ECS by a team led by Dr Mike Wald, has won the EUNIS Dorup E-learning Award 2009.

The prestigious award was presented to Dr Wald at the EUNIS (European University Information Systems) 2009 conference ‘IT: Key of the European Space for Knowledge’, held last week at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

‘The judges said that Synote won because it is incredibly innovative and they could see that it brought lots of new opportunities for students,’ said Mike.

‘Getting the Award and having it presented at the conference is great publicity,’ he added. ‘Synote is freely available and we want as many people as possible to try it out.’

Synote makes multimedia resources such as video and audio easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture. ‘Imagine how difficult it would be to use a textbook if it had no contents page, index or page numbers,’ said Mike. ‘Synote actually provides the way to find or associate notes with a particular part of a recording.’

Synote’s synchronised transcripts can be produced manually or automatically using IBM speech recognition technologies. Synote has a whole range of useful features. It enables learners or teachers to read and search text transcripts and slides and replay recordings to support learning style preference, deafness, disability or English as a second language; to bookmark, tag and highlight and link to or from sections of recordings for indexing, revision, clarification or feedback; and to collaboratively annotate recordings with notes and URLs of related resources.

Synote can play most audio and video formats on most browsers and computers. Evaluations have shown that students like using Synote, find the synchronised transcripts and note-taking facility useful and want more recordings and lectures to be available in this way. Synote has been developed with the support of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and is being used in the European Net4Voice project.

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

A new infrastructure that enables more effective scientific research by linking data in an accessible way has been developed in ECS.

According to Hugh Glaser of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who developed the system – RKBExplorer, it is an important step towards achieving Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web.

‘We have built a knowledge-based infrastructure that provides new ways of linking and presenting scientific information,’ he said.

‘It will be of particular interest to scientists developing systems that require exceptional resilience, where, for example, faults could cause loss of life, or impact disastrously on business or the economy.’

RKB (Resilience Knowledge Base) Explorer uses the Semantic Web to discover scientific activities concerned with building resilient systems, and at the same time identifies links and relationships between them. RKBExplorer then uses this Linked Data to provide access to the information in a user-friendly way, helping the user to build their own resilient systems.

‘Our system has the advantage over others in that it can identify indirect but potentially significant inter-relationships not only between people, publications and projects, but also between these and information about tools, components and training materials, and present them in an unambiguous way,’ comments Hugh Glaser.

‘Sir Tim Berners-Lee said that “Linked Data is the Semantic Web done right, and the World Wide Web done rightâ€?,’ he added. ‘We see RKBExplorer as a step towards realizing this vision.’

RKBExplorer was built as part of a Network of Excellence project, funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Information Society Technologies Programme. It provides a unified view of the Linked Data in many bibliographic sources as well as European-funded research projects and those funded by the National Science Foundation.

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

Researchers in ECS have been awarded funding to develop efficient test methods to improve the reliability of low-power computing systems.

The project team led by Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, a co-director of the Pervasive Systems Centre at ECS, and co-investigator, Professor Mark Zwolinski, also from ECS, in conjunction with ARM (UK), and Synopsys (USA), has been awarded £352,400 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The team aims to improve the reliability of low-power embedded computing systems of the type used in mobile devices such as mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and iPods.

According to Professor Al-Hashimi, computing systems used in hand-held products are extremely complex with millions of transistors of nano-meter dimensions operating with very low voltages to reduce power consumption.

A current challenge for designers and manufacturers is to develop efficient test methods for these computing systems which operate at such low voltages, so that any defects are identified after manufacturing and can be corrected leading to more reliable end products.

‘If we use existing methods to identify defective integrated systems after manufacturing, without considering the systems operating voltages and semiconductor manufacturing process variation, defects will be missed by the test leading to less reliable products,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi.

The new EPSRC grant will focus on exploring and developing new and efficient test methods capable of mitigating the impact of voltage and process variation leading to improved test quality and higher dependability.

‘This funding is timely as I believe our research findings will make a major contribution to this new research area of voltage and process variation-aware test technology, consolidating our group as an internationally-leading research presence,’ Professor Al-Hashimi added.

This research is part of the ECS-ARM Centre of Excellence initiative that began in 2008, and is directed by Professor Al-Hashimi, and Dr David Flynn (ARM Fellow), and a visiting professor at ECS. ARM is a market leader in the design of high performance, low-power processors for hand-held devices.

The project will begin in January 2010 and run for three years.

Another milestone has been passed in the new Mountbatten Building clean rooms with the commissioning of the ‘Spectra’ detector on the Zeiss Orion beam instrument.

The detector is the first of its kind to be installed, and measures the energy of the helium ions which bounce off the sample. ‘We are playing billiards with atoms’ said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, who has been instrumental in acquiring the Orion. ‘The helium ion we fire into the sample is the cue ball, the instrument itself is the cue which fires the helium atom at the sample, and inside the sample it hits an atom and bounces off. Now atoms don’t come in different colours like billiard balls, but they do come in different masses (atomic weights) and by measuring the energy of the ion which bounces off we can tell what type of atom it actually hit.’

The reason this is important is that modern nano devices use extremely thin layers of materials, and this turns out to be a very good way to measure the composition of such thin layers.

The bump on the right-hand side of the graph pictured shows helium ions bouncing off a layer of hafnium oxide just a few nano metres thick – a few millionths of a millimetre – on a silicon wafer, which would be almost undetectable by any other technique. Hafnium is a rare element, but its oxide has great promise for applications in next generation nano-electronic devices.

In fact this measurement technique has links to the first detection of the atomic nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1911. He used alpha particles – naturally produced high speed helium ions – and observed them being scattered by sitting in a dark room for hours and observing tiny flashes of light on a screen.

‘I’m sure Rutherford would be amazed by modern day instrumentation’ said Professor Rutt, ‘but fundamentally we are doing exactly what he did, almost a century later, to help develop the next generation of high speed, low power electronic devices. Actually it turns out that Rutherford himself didn’t do much of the sitting in darkened rooms; he left that to a PhD student, Ernest Marsden; there’s a moral in there somewhere!’

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

A 'strikingly modern partnership of equals' between computer science and the digital humanities will be called for by Professor Willard McCarty in a keynote address at InterFace 2009 on Thursday 9 July.

Professor McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing at King's College London, will deliver a keynote entitled: 'Imagining the hunt: Cutting edge, collaborative, digitally human and reciprocal' at InterFace 2009, a symposium on cross-fertilisation between technology and the humanities, which will take place at the University of Southampton on 9 and 10 July.

As the title of his keynote suggests, Professor McCarty will ring the changes on the thematic elements of the conference - cutting edge research, collaborative work, the digital humanities and their interrelations with computer science.

In terms of 'cutting edginess', he will highlight the uneasy and uncertain effects of progress in the humanities. He will suggest that together computer science and the digital humanities nevertheless have the opportunity of creating a 'trading zone'. Both disciplines, he will argue, are well equipped in their own right, but each needs to understand the other’s ways of questioning and to recognise how its own questions can become in the other’s context daring, exciting and relevant - not simply useful.

He will go on to sketch a working definition of 'digital humanities' as exemplified in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. Nevertheless, he will suggest, there is considerable uncertainty world-wide about how to negotiate relations between computing and the humanities. Despite the fact that humanistic research has been done with computing since 1949, there are still no widely accepted institutional models for the digital humanities, hence no standard ways of getting computer scientists and humanists together. Close attention needs to be paid to what the disciplines on both sides want to achieve and how in each institutional circumstance they are to do that, he will argue.

In terms of 'reciprocity', Professor McCarty, citing Leibniz’s dream of uniting empirics and theoreticians, will argue that: ‘Changing what needs to be changed, this dream provides an appealing vision of wholeness for which humanists and computer scientists could strive – a strikingly modern partnership of equals, no one on a pedestal, no one calling all the shots. It seems to me that the contributions each [group] has to give to the other are sufficiently attractive as easily to make a strong case for institutional as well as individual action.’

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