Over 200 new undergraduates are joining the School of Electronics and Computer Science this week.

The new students have been welcomed to the School with a series of events that form the ‘JumpStart’ induction programme, including talks, social events, and a Challenge which introduces them to the City of Southampton.

The students are enrolling in one of 23 programmes in Computer Science, IT in Organisations, Electronics, and Electrical Engineering. Their courses begin formally on Monday 4 October.

Among those queueing at today’s registration (Thursday) were MEng Electronic Engineering students Josef Capindale from Lincoln, Michael Barber from Croydon, and Philip Crump from the USA, who were all positive about the JumpStart experience. ‘It’s been really good to meet lots of new people,’ said Josef. ‘It’s going smoothly so far,’ said Michael, and Philip agreed: ‘There's so much that's new, but it’s good so far!’

The JumpStart event has been organized by a team led by ECS student Alan Huynh, who recruited around 70 students to help. Amongst them is Part 2 Computer Science student Raluca Laic from Romania: ‘It’s been really exciting being in the place of the students who helped me last year,’ she said. ‘It’s been an awesome week – the students have been no trouble at all, and have been really forthright in asking us for help.

‘Last year I enjoyed the City Challenge since it’s a good way to find your way around somewhere new. It’s a great start to the year.’

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel. 023 3059 5453

Professor Dame Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science will celebrate the 125th anniversary of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) next week with a lecture on the progress of the World Wide Web and its future potential.

In a lecture entitled 'Research Sans Frontières', which Professor Hall will deliver at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London on Tuesday 6 October, she will claim that the second phase of the World Wide Web – the era of the Linked Web of Data – will have as much impact on our world as the Web had when it first emerged.

‘Nearly 20 years later, for a variety of reasons, the world is beginning to understand the value of sharing data over the internet,’ she will say. ‘It is our hypothesis that the Linked Web of Data will become the dominant data sharing and integration platform and that its effect on our world will be as profound and unexpected as the impact of the first Web.’

Professor Hall, who has published over 400 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and Web technologies, will go on to describe how, in a very short space of time, we have come to live in a web-dependent society within a web-dependent world, facts which make it crucial to understand the current, evolving and potential Web. She will present the important of Web Science, which embraces the study of these phenomena and she will explore the opportunities and challenges posed by the increasing need for interdisciplinary research undertaken by international teams and the role that universities, governments and learned societies can play to facilitate such exciting and necessary developments.

‘We are now at a point when we can study the Web as both a technical and social phenomenon and we can operate an interdisciplinary research agenda which knows no international boundaries in terms of its scope,’ she will say.

The IEEE 125th Anniversary London Event will take place on Tuesday 6 October at the Royal Institution of Great Britain at 21 Albemarle Street W1S 4BS from 4-6.30pm.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional society with more than 375,000 members in 160 countries. Its United Kingdom/Republic of Ireland Section is the 2nd largest among 329 Sections worldwide with 11,000 members. IEEE technical interests range from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

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

A record number of 300 students have enrolled on the School’s MSc courses. Professor Darren Bagnall, Director of the MSc Programme, welcomed the new students warmly, saying that increased demand both from overseas and the UK meant that the School had raised its admissions criteria. ‘We are very pleased to welcome such a high-achieving cohort of MSc students,’ he said, ‘and look forward to what will undoubtedly be a strong contribution to the life of the School.’

Professor Bagnall also paid tribute to the work of the School’s Postgraduate Admissions Office in processing and converting the large number of applications.

The largest programme is Wireless Communications, which has 69 students this year, but Software Engineering and Web Technologies have also attracted significant numbers of students. Twenty-one students are taking the new 4-year PhDs in Complex Systems Simulation introduced by the EPSRC this year. The degree programme includes an initial year of MSc study, followed by three years of PhD research.

Queueing up to register for their courses last week was Ruizhe Wang from China, taking the MSc in Microelectronics Systems Design. ‘It’s very exciting to come here. I chose ECS because it’s very famous, has very prestigious teachers and microelectronics here is very good.’

The students had their induction programme last week, including a boat trip around the Port of Southampton. However, courses began in earnest today with the first day of term.

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

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Co-Director of the ECS Pervasive Systems Centre, is leading a new £1.6M project, funded by the EPSRC, which will develop ultra energy-efficient electronic systems for emerging applications including mobile digital health and autonomous wireless monitoring in environmental and industrial settings.

Southampton is one of four universities (the others are Bristol, Newcastle, and Imperial College) which will undertake this three-year collaborative research project in partnership with five industrial companies: QinetiQ, Zetex, ARM, NXP and Mentor Graphics.

‘There is now a consensus that we are entering the era of electronics powered, or at least augmented by, energy harvesters,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi. ‘Future self-powered applications will require electronic systems that are more complex and more compact but also intelligent, adaptive and able to perform more computation with less energy.’

The new research programme will take a holistic design approach to the complex issues surrounding the development of next-generation energy-harvesting systems and the research partners aim to exploit the interactions between the micro-generator, power conditioning circuitry and computational electronics in order to make efficient use of the energy generated.

The new design methodology will be incorporated into a novel mixed-technology domain modelling and performance optimization design toolkit. This design approach is fundamental to ultra energy-efficient design and to the miniaturisation of next-generation wireless electronics.

‘The research joins up three different research fields,’ said Professor Al-Hashimi, ‘including energy harvesting and MEMS processing methods, low-power embedded computing systems, and electronic design automation. This requires interdisciplinary collaboration which the Pervasive Systems Centre is in a unique position to facilitate.’

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

The challenges which face the World Wide Web in its next phase and the need for academics to embrace its further development will be outlined by Professor Dame Wendy Hall next week.

Professor Hall, who is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will receive the Duncan Davies Medal and deliver the 2009 Duncan Davies Lecture on the topic of 'Research 2.0: The Age of Networks' at a Research & Development Society event at the Royal Society on Monday 12 October at 6.30pm.

The Duncan Davies Medal is awarded annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution toward making the UK the best-performing research and development environment in the world.

In her lecture Professor Hall will describe how since its inception the Web has changed the ways we communicate, collaborate, and educate and how the next generation of Web technology will increasingly facilitate interdisciplinary research by international teams to tackle the major problems faced by the world today.

‘The role of government is crucial in setting policies to create an environment in which such research can flourish but in the age of networks, universities may also have to radically change in order to facilitate such exciting and necessary developments and better train people to meet the needs of businesses in the future,’ she will say.

‘In a very short space of time we have come to live in a web-dependent society within a web-dependent world,’ she will go on to say. ‘There is a growing realization that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed.’

She will illustrate this by discussing the importance of Web Science, the new research discipline which embraces the study of these phenomena and she will explore the opportunities and challenges posed by the increasing need for interdisciplinary research undertaken by international teams and the role that universities, governments and learned societies can play to facilitate such exciting and necessary developments.

The 2009 Duncan Davies lecture on the topic of 'Research 2.0: The Age of Networks' will take place at the Royal Society on Monday 12 October at 6.30pm at 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG.

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

Dr Thanassis Tiropanis and Prof Hugh Davis of the ECS Learning Societies Lab and Dr Patrick Carmichael of the University of Cambridge organized the first international workshop on Semantic Web applications for learning and teaching support in Higher Education, which took place at the end of September.

SemHE’09 was held in Nice, France, and co-located with the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning ECTEL’09. Twenty-five delegates from nine different countries took part in the workshop which the organizers hope will be the first in a series of workshops in this area.

‘Our aim is to look at semantic applications in the context of higher education,’ says Dr Tiropanis. ‘In the era of Web 2.0 and Linked Data, with increased requirements for interoperability on a large scale, we need to establish the value of semantic technologies in the higher education context.

‘We want to look specifically at areas such as curriculum development and course creation and examine ways in which semantic technologies support existing or emerging pedagogical approaches in HE such as collaborative learning, critical thinking or case-based learning.

According to Dr Tiropanis, the outcome of the Nice workshop shows that recent developments in Linked Data and Web 2.0 technologies can demonstrate significant potential for supporting higher education challenges and fostering pedagogical innovation.

He believes that the potential for innovation will be further advanced if institutions adopt linked data formats for information they already make public on their Web pages.

During the workshop the potential of enabling approximation in queries for more efficient searches was presented and a number of challenges were identified, relating to the provenance, sustainability, licensing and reliability of today’s linked data cloud. Presentations also focused on how case-based learning can benefit from semantic technologies across a number of disciplines, and how searching learning resources within or across universities can be made more efficient and personalised.

The need to examine further how people relate and interact with resources and with one another in today’s linked data cloud was highlighted in the discussions that followed the paper presentations and the panel session.

'It was a very successful workshop both in terms of the number of delegates and their participation in the discussion,' said Dr Tiropanis. 'Looking at semantic technologies for higher education in this new context will hopefully be fruitful for institutions, teachers and learners.' This workshop was jointly organised and supported by the JISC-funded project SemTech and the ESRC/EPSRC-funded project ENSEMBLE.

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

Professor Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, USA, and one of the world’s leading network scientists, is to become a Director of the Web Science Trust.

Now rapidly emerging as an important and vibrant area of research and academic endeavour, critical for our understanding of the Web and society, Web Science was launched as a new academic discipline in 2006 under the aegis of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). The progress made by WSRI in advancing Web Science will now be taken forward by the new Web Science Trust, and Professor Contractor joins WSRI Founding Directors, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor James Hendler, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt as Directors of the Web Science Trust. ‘I’m delighted to welcome Noshir Contractor to the Web Science Trust,’ said Dame Wendy Hall. ‘One of the great successes of the Web has been the ability to create and sustain increasingly complex online networks, and Network Science provides powerful insights into how this is happening and what will be its implications for the future. We have ambitious plans for the development of our Web Science activities and look forward to Noshir’s contribution, which I am confident will provide new perspectives on the development of the Web Science research agenda.’

Professor Contractor is Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts, including communities of practice in business, science, and engineering, public health networks, and virtual worlds.

He commented: ‘Network Science, like Web Science, is directly addressing the grand societal challenges that we face in the 21st century. Whether these are challenges of the Environment, Energy, Public Health, or Security, the potential of the Web, especially in the formation of networks, plays an increasingly important part in determining how we can understand the challenges and begin to create solutions. I look forward to being part of the Web Science Trust and to working with its Directors and research teams to advance both our disciplines.’

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

The GLACSWEB project has entered a new phase with a planned deployment of its electronic sensors in the Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico.

GLACSWEB has been using the sensors – custom-engineered and built in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton – to monitor glacier movements in response to climate change since 2003. Led by Dr Kirk Martinez of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group, and Professor Jane Hart of the School of Geography, the GLACSWEB team first deployed the sensors on the Briksdalsbreen glacier in Norway. The project has aimed to understand glacier dynamics and climatic change, and to make advances in pervasive sensor networks.

Probes have been installed in the sedimentary base of the glacier, about 60 metres under the surface, through the use of a powerful hot-water drill. They record temperature, pressure, speed and movement of the ice, and more importantly of the sediments at its base. Signals emitted by the probes at noon each day carry the data, which are relayed back to a base station on the glacier surface by radio communications, and then transmitted to Southampton by mobile phone. The data is available to researchers.

Large amounts of data were collected by the sensors, but the rapid melting of Briksdalsbreen meant that the glacier became too steep and dangerous to work on, so the project moved to Iceland, to the Skalafellsjokull glacier, part of the giant Vatnajokull icecap. Having successfully overcome many of the technical and logistical difficulties of collecting such critical data, the probes will now be deployed in completely different environment – the Los Laureles Canyon in Mexico, upstream from the Tijuana estuary.

Six sensors will record environmental data over the next two years, in a project funded by the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the hope that data on changes in the canyon could provide early warning of landslides.

‘A combination of technologies has made environmental sensor webs possible,’ says Dr Martinez. ‘These will eventually be spread around the world and will give us a clearer picture of exactly how we are changing our environment. In order to make successful sensor networks, issues such as: communications, low-power, robustness and adaptability have been approached through a combination of mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science and environmental science.’

See recent coverage of GLACSWEB on the BBC web site.

See GLACSWEB publications on EPrints.

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

ECS researchers have begun a trial of browser and USB (Universal Serial Bus) pen drive applications to assist with the accessibility of Web 2.0 services.

Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in the Learning Societies Lab within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are leading a project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) TechDis which looks at how well people with disabilities can access web services such as blogs and wikis and social networking sites. The team includes Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean who have all studied at ECS.

The team have built an accessibility tool kit which will enable users to test the accessibility of web 2.0 services. The accessible pen drive offers freely available assistive technologies that can be used to help with this evaluation.

The tools have been developed as a result of the award-winning LexDis project which identified some of the strategies learners used to enhance their e-learning experience.

Web2Access, part of the toolkit, provides an online checking system for any interactive web-based services such as Facebook.

'We developed it because nowadays users contribute, as well as read, information and so you cannot just click on a button to see if websites are accessible and easy to use,’ said E.A.

According to Dr Wald, it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of web services.

A key feature of the tool kit is ‘Study Bar’, which works with all browsers and reads text aloud, spell checks, and offers a dictionary, text enlargement, colour and font changes. Study Bar can be used with web services like blogs and Twitter, which has not been possible before without specialist-installed assistive technologies.

Students at the University of Southampton were introduced to the toolkit last week shortly before testing began. The beta testing will be carried out for four weeks, after which the tools will be passed to JISC TechDis so that they can be distributed further.

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

New nanoelectronics technologies for healthcare applications, including blood-testing kits which can be mass produced using nanowires, will be unveiled next week by Professor Peter Ashburn at UK NanoForum & Emerging Technologies 2009.

Professor Ashburn, Head of the Nano Research Group at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will deliver a presentation entitled 'Prospects for New Nanoelectronics Technologies in the 21st Century' at the annual event on Tuesday 3 November at London Hilton on Park Lane Hotel.

During his presentation, Professor Ashburn will describe the innovative research facilities at the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre at the University of Southampton, which houses a £100 million state-of-the art clean room, which opened last month.

According to Professor Ashburn, this facility has given a major boost to prospects for new nanotechnologies for healthcare applications and will make it possible to develop a unique method for fabricating nanowires, so that blood-testing kits can be mass-produced. This will mean that routine blood tests can be carried out in GPs' surgeries, rather than needing to be sent to laboratories, with inevitable delays. The researchers are using nanotechnology similar to that commonly used in computer and television displays to develop this new application.

‘Around one billion laboratory tests are performed in the UK each year for disease diagnosis, the monitoring of disease progression and population screening programmes,’ said Professor Ashburn.

‘If the UK is to move to more predictive, preventive and personalised healthcare, biochemical tests will need to be performed on a much larger scale, at a much lower cost and preferably at point-of-care locations, rather than clinical laboratories. Our new method will make this possible.’

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