Professor David De Roure has been appointed to the new role of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) National Strategic Director of e-Social Science, with Dr Marina Jirotka of the Oxford e-Research Centre as Deputy Director. Both are part of the e-Research South consortium.

The appointments, which begin this month and run for three years, mean that Professor De Roure and Dr Jirotka will take a key strategic role in maximising the uptake, use and impact of new e-technologies across the Social Science community. They will also develop a coherent inter-agency approach drawing on various national and international e-Social Science initiatives. 'In the past five years, the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) has made excellent progress towards establishing powerful new research tools and methods,' said Professor De Roure who directs e-Research activities at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). ‘Our experience in e-Research, coupled with the fact that Southampton is the home of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), puts us in a great position to build on the achievements of NCeSS and communicate these new approaches to the broader research community and the next generation of researchers.'

Dr Jirotka, Associate Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre, added: ‘My background in both social and computer science will enable me to assist in the coordination of training and capacity building activities to embed e-Social Science techniques in research practice and make effective use of emerging infrastructure.’

Professor Ian Diamond, Chief Executive at ESRC said:'ESRC is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor De Roure and Dr Jirotka, who combined will provide an ideal leadership team , bringing extensive experience and expertise to the NCeSS research programme to enable social scientists to harness the wealth of digital technologies in undertaking innovative world- leading research.'

Professor De Roure has just returned from an intensive tour of the US with Professor Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy, on a fact-finding mission which is set to inform UK strategy and develop international collaborations.

‘e-Science and e-Social Science are very highly thought of internationally,’ he said. ‘We are establishing a terrific network of advisors and collaborators to ensure that e-Social Science goes from strength to strength.’

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

Last week’s international celebration of Open Access was given added momentum by the announcement of the world’s 100th Open Access Mandate, from the University of Salford, UK.

This was the first-ever internationally designated Open Access Week (19-23 October), providing an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research and to celebrate the successes achieved by the Open Access movement, within the global research communities and the world’s higher education institutions.

The first Open Access Mandate was adopted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. In 2002 ECS proposed and then mandated that all of its own research output must be made accessible free for all on the Web in order to maximize its usage and impact.

While mandates at first grew slowly, despite coming from significant national research funding councils, such as the NIH in the US and RCUK in the UK, last year’s adoption of mandates by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UCL provides a strong indication that the next steps in the growth of Open Access will be exponential, according to Professor Stevan Harnad, Archivangelist of the OA Movement.

‘With the world's 100th Open Access mandate, the global Academy - the "Slumbering Giant" of Open Access - is showing irreversible signs of awakening,’ said Stevan Harnad. ‘Not all research is funded, but virtually all of it originates from universities. The coincidence of the 100th mandate with worldwide Open Access Week makes it look ever more likely that the planet is heading toward universal OA at long last, to the everlasting benefit of research, researchers, their universities, their funders, the R&D industries, and the tax-paying public that supports the research and for whose benefit it is all being conducted.’

Professor Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, commented: ‘I am delighted that Salford's Open Access mandate is the 100th in the world and that it coincides with the first international Open Access Week. Through Open Access the University of Salford can now fully contribute to the local and global knowledge economy by sharing Salford’s proud tradition for research with all.â€?

Professor Peter Suber, another leading voice in the OA movement, also welcomed Salford’s adoption of Open Access: ‘Funder and university OA policies enlarge the volume of peer-reviewed OA research and educate researchers about their OA options,’ he said.

‘The large number of institutions with strong policies, the large volume of research liberated, and the large number of researchers benefiting as authors and readers all make very clear that the OA fire has been lit in many places. We needn't worry that it will go out. Each new policy brings us closer to a tipping point of deep change in the ways that researchers disseminate peer-reviewed research and in the ways that everyone benefits from the sharing and acceleration of that research.’

Open Access Week was marked in many countries across the world: it built on the momentum begun by the student-led national day of action in 2007 and carried forward by the 120 campuses in 27 countries that celebrated Open Access Day in 2008. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture (last year’s organizers) welcomed new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), which spearheaded events in developing and transitional countries. Partner organizations also engaged their communities in every corner of the globe.

Dr Les Carr of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton and Director of EPrints at ECS which provides the software to run many of the world’s leading repositories, underlined the importance of all this concerted effort: ‘It’s important to pay tribute to the co-ordinated action of the international research community,’ he said, ‘including funding councils and research institutions across the globe which have worked in harmony through proactive local policies (mandates) to bring about international Open Access through an established network of research repositories.’

Since Salford's announcement, another five mandates have been implemented, bringing the global total of institutional mandates to 105.

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

Two ECS researchers are presenting the latest developments in learning technologies, for all students including those with disabilities, in the USA this week.

Dr Mike Wald of the School of Electronics and Computer Science Learning Societies Lab presented the latest developments in his award-winning web-based Synote at a symposium at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, New York on Monday 9 November.

He demonstrated publicly for the first time new enhancements to the programme which provide the unique ability to synchronise live notes taken using Twitter with synchronised lecture recordings and transcripts created using IBM’s speech recognition software

Synote enhances the learning of all students, including disabled students, and has been developed with the support of the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). Synote won the EUNIS Dorup E-learning Award 2009 and is being used in the UK, Germany and Italy as part of the European Net4Voice project as well as in US, Canada and Australia by other members of the Liberated Learning Consortium.

The question of how people with disabilities are to access Web 2.0 technologies as they develop further will be addressed by E.A. Draffan, also from ECS Learning Societies Lab in a presentation at the 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground - Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference in Colorado on Thursday 12 November.

E.A, who led a team which has just launched a tool kit to test the accessibility of Web 2.0 services, will deliver a lecture entitled: 'Walking the tightrope between standards and a holistic approach to Web 2.0 usability and accessibility'. In her presentation, E.A. will highlight the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of informal experts and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many web-based tools which are currently emerging. This would allow disabled students to further develop their skills and perhaps in time also become informal experts who would be willing to share the strategies they have developed with others as can be seen on the LexDis website.

'In the past, people used their assistive technologies mainly with desktop computer applications, now they are spending far more time online’, said E.A. ’They are also collaborating and communicating via social networks, blogs and wikis, which are not always accessible; however, often with the support of friends and tutors, they find workarounds and go on to build their own strategies.'

‘It is only through Open Access that research can be used, applied and built upon by all its intended users, rather than only those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it happens to be published’, says ECS Professor Stevan Harnad, commenting on a major article in today’s Times Higher Education.

The article Learning to Share provides extensive coverage of the Open Access debate and its implications for researchers and publishers. It also underlines the important role played in the development of Open Access by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and the University of Southampton.

ECS has been at the forefront of the Open Access movement since the early 1990s and was the first in the world to adopt an open access mandate (in 2002), requiring its researchers to self-archive all their research online. The EPrints software created for this purpose now drives many of the world’s leading institutional repositories.

‘ECS pioneered the institutional repository, designing the EPrints software as a means of encouraging open access in 1999,’ said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. ‘Since 2002 when we adopted our own mandate, our repository has grown to over 4000 open access full-text research publications.’

In 2005, EPrints Services was launched by the School to provide training and repository-hosting services for research institutions across the world. ‘EPrints Services has proved a great success,’ said Dr Carr, ‘enabling us to pass on the expertise that we have developed over the years and to help institutions to customize their own OA repositories for their needs.’

As well as Open Access to research publications, EPrints is being developed to support emerging Open Data and Open Science agendas through projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). ECS researchers, including Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt, Stevan Harnad, Tony Hey, Wendy Hall and Les Carr, have been at the forefront of advocating these changes in scientific practice and arguing for changes in national and international scientific policies.

Today's (12 November) article, backed up by the THE’s editorial from Ann Mroz also underlined the importance of Open Access in both generating and measuring research ‘impact’. Impact metrics are increasingly being used to evaluate and reward research excellence by funding bodies and government agencies. Ann Mroz writes: ‘A recent pre-print by Stevan Harnad et al. of research into citation impact shows that authors whose papers are made open access are cited significantly more than authors whose articles are available only to subscribers. The Open Citation Project provides ample evidence of this.' The pre-print will soon be posted publicly.

In parallel, a petition to mandate open access self-archiving has just been introduced to the German Bundestag, as both open-access mandates and open-access metrics keep gathering momentum worldwide.

ECS Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt are behind the significant change in policy towards public data announced by the Prime Minster yesterday (17 November).

Speaking to an invited audience at 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown announced that the Government would be exploring ways to make some of the Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April 2010. The Prime Minister also signalled his intention to publish 2,000 data sets in the New Year, potentially including all legislation, road-traffic information, property prices by stamp-duty yield, and motoring offences by county.

Both Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt were present at yesterday’s briefing, which represented key results of their work advising the Government over the last five months. As Government Information Advisors they have been persuasive in laying out the benefits of publishing non-personal public data for reuse, in machine-readable formats and without restrictive licences.

Writing in today’s Times (Put in your postcode, out comes the data), they note that their work is not about building a huge new IT project but more about changing attitudes: ‘We just need to change the culture of Whitehall and town halls’, they write, ‘so that data is seen as public property. At present too much is hidden from public view, compartmentalised into silos and difficult to process.’

The Government’s announcement represents a very large amount of progress over a surprisingly short timeframe: ‘It’s moving very quickly, said Nigel Shadbolt. ‘There seems to be a real appetite from users, developers and data-holders to do more with our non-personal public data.’

‘One of the most important aspects of yesterday’s announcement is the access it provides to geographical information, since it’s geography that makes sense of so much of the other information that has and will become available.’

Under the direction of the ECS Professors, the Cabinet Office has already launched a developer’s version of the data.gov.uk website, which will be public in the New Year. It currently provides access to 1100 datasets, ranging from traffic counts on the road network, through reference data on schools, to the Farm Survey. Over 1000 people are already using the site to improve and refine it for its public release.

In addition to the public gain in making the data accessible, Nigel Shadbolt also sees a range of potential benefits for technology and Web standards, and for business applications: ‘This kind of work is a good illustration of the objectives of Web Science,’ he said. ‘It includes technology development, policy, economics, and social change.’

‘Over the coming weeks we will continue to push to get more data available in addition to seeking Government commitments for the release of that data. We also want to ensure we can inspire the community to exploit the data and give us applications that will enable it to be used as widely as possible.’

The Times article concludes with a reaffirmation of the importance of this work: ‘Openly available public data not only creates economic and social capital, it also creates bottom-up pressure to improve public services. Data is essential in enabling citizens to choose between public service providers. It helps them to compare their local services with services elsewhere. It enables all of us to lobby for improvement. Public data is a public good.’

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

Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a new social networking tool that users have described as not only improving reflection and awareness of their own well-being, but also raising their interest in others.

dr mc schraefel (lower case intentional) and PhD student Paul André, at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, set out to look at whether Healthii, a social networking tool which would allow participants to communicate well-being quickly and easily via Facebook or Twitter, would improve personal and group well-being and interactions.

'We’re really interested in what might be called "affective micro climates"' says dr schraefel. 'In other words – if we can see how we’re doing and how our peers are doing, does that give us better opportunities to see how we might enhance our quality of life at work?'

dr schraefel and Paul André closely studied 10 participants using Healthii over five weeks and their key findings were:

• Half of participants said they felt that their self-awareness increased, in terms of self-reflection at the time of the update, and reflection over past states • Eight of ten participants reported that their awareness of other group members increased (in fact as a result of the communications, one member noticed that her husband was ill, at a time she might not otherwise have noticed!) • Half the participants said they would really miss this level of communication when the trial ended.

'When we embarked on Healthii, we anticipated that people would use it to be aware of their peers,' said dr schraefel. 'What surprised us more was that they appeared to be getting a lot of value by doing a little self-reflection.'

Healthii enabled users to encode their well-being status into social networking sites and microblogs. The status was represented by four dimensions (busy-ness, enjoyment, stress, and health), and by choosing one of three levels (not, quite, or very) in each dimension. A Facebook application let users select their state (as well as view the group or past updates), represented by a graphical avatar or numeric code, and users could also update simply by adding the numeric code to a Twitter or Facebook update. For example, adding #healthii (3321) would mean the person is feeling very busy, enjoying their task, averagely stressed, but feeling a bit under the weather.

'The trial of Healthii showed that participants used and valued status expression both for self-reflection and group awareness. One participant commented he valued being made to think about how he was feeling, whereas Twitter currently makes him think about what value others would get from his tweet, or whether they might find it amusing,' said Paul André.

'In our field of Human-Computer Interaction, we’re used to designing to support efficiency or productivity in tasks,' said dr schraefel. 'That’s important, but we’re now beginning to consider how to design systems to support well-being while engaged in everyday tasks to enhance quality of life. We think these kinds of awareness applications may be a part of that.'

'Eventually, we hope to inspire designers and researchers not only to explore these attributes in social networking applications, but also to consider the potential for well-being measures across Human-Computer Interaction the same way we consider efficiency today,' Paul André added.

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

Professor Dame Wendy Hall will be giving the 6th Southampton City Lecture on Monday 30 November, on the subject ‘The Emerging Science of the Web and why it is Important'.

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 to bring together researchers and educators from many disciplines, including computer science, engineering, the social sciences, health and the humanities to study the World Wide Web.

Professor Hall was one of the Founding Directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, along with ECS Professors Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J Weitzner. Many successes have been achieved over the last three years including the award of the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science to the University of Southampton and the establishment of a new global series of Web Science Conferences. The progress and achievements made in raising awareness of the importance of Web Science and in building the foundations and framework for the new discipline will now be taken forward by the newly-established Web Science Trust. In her lecture Professor Hall will explore how Web Science has become established, the insights that are beginning to emerge from it, and the major challenges ahead. 'The Web is a critical global infrastructure,' she says, 'with hundreds of billions of pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life.

'Little appreciated, however, is the fact that the Web is more than the sum of its pages and it is more than its technical protocols. Vast emergent properties have arisen that are transforming society, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As we seek to understand its origins, appreciate its current state and anticipate possible futures there is a need to address the critical questions that will determine how the Web evolves.' Professor Dame Wendy Hall, FRS, is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and President of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest organization for computing professionals. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at the forefront of the subject ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas, including digital libraries, the development of Web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web) and, recently, she has pioneered the establishment and development of Web Science. She has been influential in the development and formation of scientific policy, through many significant roles, and continues to be a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in science, engineering and technology.

Tickets for this lecture, which takes place at 6.15 pm on Monday 30 November in the Turner Sims Concert Hall, are available from the Turner Sims Box Office; tel.023 8059 5151. Refreshments are available in the foyer from 5.30 pm.

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

A team of academics and students at the University of Southampton have begun work on a solar-electric-powered boat which they claim will be one of the most sophisticated to enter the annual prestigious Solar Splash competition so far.

Team Tarka led by Dr Peter Wilson of the Electronic Systems and Devices group in ECS, comprises experts across the University of Southampton in Electronics, Nanotechnology, Solar Energy and Ship Science. They have come together to design and build a light and efficient boat to compete in next year’s Solar Splash event, which will take place in Arkansas from 9-13 June 2010. In order to develop their ideas and materials further, the team is seeking collaboration with local businesses interested in 'green' boats or buildings, aerospace, engineering or general manufacturing. In 2009 a number of companies sponsored key elements of the boat to a successful outcome, and the team is looking for sponsors at different levels for this year’s competition. Solar Splash is the World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating. The competition takes place over five days, with technical inspections on the first day and the remainder of the time occupied by five on-the-water competitive events, when speed, manoeuvrability and endurance are tested. Last year was the first time that a British university entered a boat in the competition. Despite having virtually no budget for the project and having to economise so much that they bought the boat's motor on eBay, they still managed to come in the top ten, winning awards for the ‘Rookie Team with the Highest Overall Score’ and ‘top teamwork’, ‘sportsmanship’, and a top three finish in the qualifying event, with the result that the team qualified as one of the ‘elite’ boats for 2010. “Last year, we managed to produce a boat which was simple and light,â€? said Dr Wilson. “This year, due to our new laboratory facilities, carbon fibre expertise and our advances in solar-powered technology, we can invest in a more professionally engineered boat aiming to be one of the most sophisticated solar-powered boats ever designed within the constraints of the Solar Splash competition. “Furthermore, this is now a University-wide team, with significant contributions from the world-leading schools of Electronics and Computer Science, and Engineering Sciences.â€?

ECS Professor David De Roure is one of the principal researchers in a new project which enables the online analysis of a wide variety of music from all over the world.

The Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information (SALAMI) project, which involves academics from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and international partners, has been funded by three leading research agencies to deliver a very substantive web-accessible corpus of musical analyses in a common framework for use in particular by music scholars and students.

The funding was awarded under the Digging into Data Challenge Competition and announced last week in Ottawa, Canada. The programme’s funders are the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada

This project will make it possible to embark on a significant exercise in musical analysis involving up to 350,000 songs.

'To date, musical analysis has been conducted by individuals on a small scale,' said Professor David De Roure, who is a Professor of Computer Science in ECS and a keen musician with a background in music retrieval.

'This innovative project means that the range of music analysed will be of far larger variety than anything previously done. Previous analytic research work focused primarily on Western popular and classical music. Our vast dataset includes a wide variety of music from all over the world, from many time periods, and includes folk, classical, contemporary, improvised, and live music.'

Over an intensive 15-month period, the team will use a set of algorithms and tools for extracting features from recorded music and produce an open source dataset for thousands of pieces of music which will provide a rich resource for music scholars, providing new perspectives and insights previously unavailable.

The University of Southampton will develop SALAMI with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. The US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has donated thousands of hours of processing time, and other collaborators include the Internet Archive and the BBC.

The first Masters degree which will train students to design future embedded computing systems will begin next year and is being run by the University of Southampton and European partners: Kaiserslautern University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at Trondheim.

The European Masters in Embedded Computing Systems (EMECS) is a two-year programme which has received funding from the Erasmus Mundus Master Programme; it will allow scholarships to be awarded to the world’s best students to study at any two of the three participating universities.

Students will benefit from the University of Southampton's expertise in System on Chip and Electronics, Trondheim's knowledge in Electronics and Communications and Kaiserslautern’s strong track record in Embedded Systems.

'This is a new Masters course in Embedded Computing Systems – winning the recent round of funding on the Erasmus Mundus programme,' said Dr Peter Wilson, of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group. 'We believe that funding for this Masters will attract some of the best students from around the world, who will benefit from the best expertise in Europe in the field of embedded systems.'

The team at the University of Southampton is led by Dr Peter Wilson, and also includes Professor Andrew Brown and Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of the ECS Electronic Systems and Devices group.

The closing date for applications for this Masters is 15 January 2010.

Those interested in applying should contact: Dr Christian Tuttas at Kaiserslautern University.