The unique contribution to research and innovation of an ECS Professor has been recognized by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton was honoured by the Aristotle University, the largest university in Greece, in recognition of her contribution to the foundation of Web Science and her distinguished service to science. The ceremony was held at the Teloglion Foundation of Arts and Science and was followed the next day by a civic ceremony when Professor Hall received an honorary citizenship award from the City of Veria for her contribution to the establishment and support of the Graduate Program in Web Science at Veria, Greece.

Professor Hall said: "I am honoured to be a citizen of Veria and to teach in the first Graduate Programme in Web Science."

The Programme in Web Science is based on the study of Web assessment, mathematical modelling and operations combined with business applications and societal transformations in the knowledge society. It is administered by the Department of Mathematics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and supported by the Municipality of Veria and Cyta Telecommunications.

During the ceremony, Professor Hall spoke about how the Web affects interpersonal relationships, safety on the Internet and the enormous role it plays in education. She also refered to distance education and the benefits of the postgraduate programme in Web Science for the city of Veria. "Innovation, Competitiveness and Development", would be the greatest benefits, she said.

After the ceremony Professor Hall visited the campus and met students, concluding her visit with the words: "I am honored to say that I teach in Veria."

Professor Dame Wendy Hall is Managing Director of the Web Science Trust and one of the founders of the discipline of Web Science. She is currently President of the Association for Computing Machinery, the first non-North-American to hold this position.

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

ECS researchers are developing intelligent medical sensors which can be worn by patients to monitor their symptoms and which will alert GPs if medical intervention is needed.

Dr Koushik Maharatna of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and Professor John Morgan (University of Southampton School of Medicine) and Dr Nick Curzen at Southampton University Hospital NHS Trust are part of a team working on the £18 million European-funded CHIRON (Cyclic and Person-Centric Health Management: Integrated Approach for Home Mobile and Clinical Environment) project, which aims to combine state-of-the-art technologies and innovative solutions into an integrated framework, designed to enable more effective health management.

Over the first two years of the three-year project, Dr Maharatna and his colleagues will develop advanced ultra low-power signal processing algorithms and circuits embedded within the sensors to create intelligent medical sensors with decision-making capability. During the final year of the project, the team will then use the technology to test approximately 400 people (200 in Southampton and 200 in Rome) from a high risk heart disease group.

"One of the major technical issues when we deploy these sensors is that they need to be wearable, low-power and work in noisy environments 24 hours a day," said Dr Maharatna. "Our task is to develop new ultra low-power algorithms and corresponding circuits so that the technology will make it possible for a patient’s GP to be alerted at any point of time through the patient’s device if medical assistance is needed."

The other project partners are: FIMI S.r.l. (Italy), University of Bologna (Italy), Philips Healthcare (The Netherlands), CIMNE (Spain), Athena RC/ISI (Greece), ESI-TECNALIA (Spain), Mortara Rangoni Europe (Italy), WLAB S.r.l. (Italy), CEIT (Spain), University of Trieste(Italy), ALMA IT Systems (Spain), University of Rome “La Sapienzaâ€? (Italy), I+ SRL (Italy), IBERMATICA (Spain), INTRACOM (Greece), ATOS ORIGIN (Spain), ELSAG DATAMAT (Italy), Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust (United Kingdom), ITS (Italy), CARDIONETICS (United Kingdom), Jozef Stefan Institute (Slovenia), BARCO (Belgium), ZorgGermak (The Netherlands), Mobili d.o.o. (Slovenia), Budapest University of Technology (Hungary).

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

A new technology platform for testing drugs will simplify the process and drive new research for the treatment of diseases such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and certain types of heart disease.

Scientists at the University of Southampton and Birkbeck College, University of London, are developing a platform consisting of an array of artificial cell membranes that will enable more efficient testing of potential new drugs.

The Bilayer Platform project, which begins this month, has been awarded £1.2 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to develop a new technology that uses artificial bilayer lipid membranes to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs on ion channels.

Professor Hywel Morgan and Dr Maurits de Planque at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will use the clean room technology in the new Mountbatten Building at the University of Southampton to build this novel platform for parallel on-chip electrophysiology. Each membrane patch will contain different ion channels.

According to Dr de Planque, ion channels play a pivotal role in a wide variety of physiological processes and diseases and are consequently of considerable interest to the pharmaceutical industry. It is for this reason the Southampton group has teamed up with the Birkbeck group, led by Professor Bonnie Ann Wallace, who are international experts in ion channel structure and function. At the moment, pharmaceutical companies use electrodes to test entire cells, which can be expensive and involves testing a number of ion channels within the cell. About 60 per cent of drugs work on membrane proteins (of which ion channels are a subclass) and the effectiveness of the drug is gauged by measuring activity in the ion channel as a result of administering the drug.

"By putting the ion channel into an artificial membrane, we only have one type of channel, no living cells and a relatively inexpensive method for testing for several of these types of channels at once," said Dr de Planque.

The project, which will take just over three years, will benefit public and private sector industries, as well as driving new research for the treatment of diseases such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and certain types of heart disease. The new technology platform will have many applications for drug discovery and testing long after the research period ends.

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

ECS researchers have been awarded a contract to design telecommunications networks across India and China.

Professor Lajos Hanzo, Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, and his team are working in a consortium with nine UK institutions and seven Indian Institutes of Technology to design the next generation of wireless systems across India.

"India has a huge rural population and our aim is to provide telecommunications for remote villages,â€? says Professor Hanzo. “This is very challenging and there are theoretical and practical constraints but there is a huge need for this to support next generation healthcare and other services in India."

The five-year (two phase) initiative is in its first phase and is funded in collaboration between the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Digital Economy Programme and the Indian Government Department of Science and Technology (DST) together with the ICT industry to the tune of over £10 million.

The project is referred to as the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre (IU-ATC) of Excellence in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services, and is led overall by Professor Gerard Parr from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.

In another project, UK-China Science Bridges: R&D on (B)4G Wireless Mobile Communications (UC4G), which has the ultimate goal of creating a UK-China Joint R&D Centre for Future Wireless Communication Networks, and is funded by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) to facilitate the collaboration of British and Chinese academic institutions, Professor Hanzo and his team are working with academic and industrial partners to develop next-generation global wireless telecommunications systems.

In this three-year China-UK project, a test bed will be created for the research and development of cutting-edge mobile communication systems.

In the UK consortium, there are six academic partners led by Dr Cheng-Xiang Wang of Heriot-Watt University, four associate academic members, and the Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence (representing its 15 industrial members). The Chinese consortium consists of seven academic partners and six industrial partners led by the Shanghai Research Centre for Wireless Communications (WiCO).

Professor Hanzo commented: "China and India together form a market of two billion people. The provision of effective telecommunications in these markets will have a powerful influence on industry."

These systems are expected to support flawless tele-presence with the aid of three-dimensional (3D) ‘Avatar-style’ stereoscopic video and audio communications. The team at Southampton has recently made substantial investments in 3D cameras and displays as well as in holographic visualization facilities in support of these radical research goals.

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

ECS senior lecturer Dr Mike Wald has won a prestigious national award which recognizes teaching excellence in higher education.

Dr Wald, of the School’s Learning Societies Lab, has been named a National Teaching Fellow by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) for his work on accessible technologies.

The citation on the HEA web site reads:

"Throughout his teaching career Dr Wald has improved learning for students through his excellence in teaching and his innovative creation, development and use of technology. He has helped change national policy, won many awards and achieved international recognition as a scholar and a champion for disabled students.

"Dr Wald advised and helped establish the disability services at Southampton and many other universities, directly benefitting the learning experiences of many thousands of students. When speech recognition technologies first became available, he identified their potential for enhancing learning for disabled and dyslexic students and worked closely with international colleagues to turn this potential into a reality. His most recent innovation, Synote, is being used by universities worldwide to transform learning for all students.

"A student at the University of Southampton commented: 'Synote is the best system I have ever seen for assistive technology it is very useful for me to understand what the lecturer taught after class I hope all school majors could integrate this system - thanks.'

Dr Wald enjoys seeing others make use of the free technologies he has developed to enhance the learning of their students, and looks forward to developing further Synote and other technologies for the benefit of all students in HE.

Academic colleagues in Europe and North America commented: 'Dr Wald is a model academic worthy of our praise - he genuinely cares about teaching and learning, conducts world-class research, engages students in cutting-edge learning opportunities, and collaborates broadly both within the academic community and beyond on educationally focused initiatives . . . The systems he has envisioned, designed, and deployed are being used in many countries around the world. More importantly, they're providing real, tangible benefits for students. The ripple effect of his dedication to teaching excellence is profound and far-reaching. His approach and his insight make him a "technology visionary", able to build strong bridges between the field of IT skills and those more closely related to educational issues and learning processes."

Simon Kemp, School of Civil Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton also received a National Teaching Fellowship and he and Mike were among 50 awarded in the UK as a whole. Professor Debra Humphris, University of Southampton Pro Vice-Chancellor (Education), says: "The award of National Teaching Fellowships to Simon and Mike provides clear recognition of both their national standing and the esteem in which they are held by the University. Their commitment to students is outstanding and I am delighted that this has been nationally recognised."

This year’s Fellows were chosen from nearly 200 nominations submitted to the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme by higher education institutions, and each will receive an award of £10,000, which may be used for professional development in teaching and learning or aspects of pedagogy.

The Higher Education Academy supports the sector in providing the best possible learning experience for all students. The Academy is an independent organisation funded by grants from the four UK higher education funding bodies, subscriptions from higher education institutions, and grant and contract income for specific initiatives.

Dr Wald commented: "I am very pleased to have my work recognized and look forward to more universities and teachers using Synote as it enhances learning for all students." He is pictured here with the EUNIS Dorup E-learning Award 2009, one of a number of awards he has received for Synote.

ECS Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, and Professor Tony Hey have all been taking part in the Royal Society’s 'See Further: Festival of Science + Arts' at the South Bank Centre, London, this week, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt has been taking part in the Guardian 'Activate 2010' conference, also in London.

The See Further celebration is part of the 350th anniversary celebrations for the Royal Society and is a 10-day event exploring links between the sciences and arts, through cross-disciplinary collaborations, scientific and artistic events.

Tim Berners-Lee and Wendy Hall were panel members in the Future Technologies event which took place on Monday 28 June in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, joining Stephen Fry, Dr Jim Haseloff of Cambridge University and tech critic Bill Thompson of the BBC to discuss how current inventions could change our image of technology and the culture we live in. The panel discussion can be viewed here.

On Thursday 1 July Wendy Hall gave the keynote at Tomorrow’s Giants which was organized in partnership with 'Nature'. The event considered what is required across three different themes: Careers, Data, and Measuring and assessing to enable academic achievement of the highest quality .

Professor Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of External Research at Microsoft, and former Head of School of Electronics and Computer Science, was a member of the afternoon panel along with Lord Drayson, former Minister for Science and Innovation. Dr Martin Charlton of the ECS Nano group was one of the event’s organizers.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt took part in The Guardian’s Activate Summit, as part of a very distinguished group of industry, academic and media representatives. The panel event was titled Technology, Society and the Future: Changing the world through the Internet and Nigel was part of the Panel talking about Politics, Democracy and Public Life, along with Martha Lane-Fox, UK digital champion, Steven Clift of E-Democracy, and Beth Simone Noveck , Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House Open Government Initiative.

See the news flow on Twitter.

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

The University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) EPrints repository of research publications is now one of the top ten in the world, according to the official world ranking of institutional repositories (published this week).

Southampton ECS EPrints is ranked number 10 in the world, just behind MIT and the combined campuses of the University of California. The University of Southampton’s university-wide EPrints repository (excluding ECS) is ranked number 27 and University College London’s repository is ranked number 79 – the only three repositories in the UK to rank in the top 100. There are 80 UK institutions in the top 800 institutional repositories.

The rankings are based principally on the number of links into the repository from external websites, demonstrating the impact of an institution’s research on the rest of the Web.

Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director, comments: “This is excellent news for Southampton, since it clearly demonstrates the value of being able to archive all our research publications on the Web and provide open access to them.

“It also underlines the success of the Open Access Initiative which, together with developments in semantic technologies in which Southampton is also in the forefront, will help ensure in the future that the world can have access to all its scientific research and that the results can be analysed and linked through the World Wide Web.â€?

The aim of the global ranking is to support Open Access initiatives which provide free access to scientific publications in an electronic form. The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton is a world-leader in the technology and design of open access repositories as well as in the design of institutional open access policy.

The University of Southampton institution-wide mandate was introduced in 2008. Wendy White, Repository Manager of University of Southampton EPrints, comments: “Providing global open access to our research ensures that a range of sectors including governments, charities and businesses can make full use of this work.â€?

“The Ranking Web of World Repositoriesâ€? is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. The rankings have been published since 2006.

Not only was ECS the first academic institution in the world to adopt a self-archiving mandate (2001), it also created the first repository-creating software (EPrints), now used by institutions worldwide. The School’s digital library researchers have also demonstrated the citation-impact advantage of self-archiving, and continue to maintain the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), tracking the number, size and growth of institutional repositories worldwide, as well as ROARMAP, tracking the global growth of self-archiving mandates by institutions and funders. Professor Stevan Harnad, the leader of the global “greenâ€? open access self-archiving movement, holds a Chair in the School.

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

A conference which will propose structures for the widespread adoption of e-assessment in education will take place at the University of Southampton next week.

The 2010 International Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) Conference: Research into e-Assessment, to be held on 20 and 21 July, is a two-day research-led event hosted by the University of Southampton and organised by its School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) with the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the Open University. The Conference aims to advance the understanding and application of information technology to the assessment process (e-assessment) through rigorous peer-reviewed research.

According to conference organiser Lester Gilbert of the ECS Learning Societies Lab, it is generally accepted that e-assessment fits the student mindset much better than setting three-hour exams, and the challenge now is to have adaptive e-assessment which provides prompt feedback to students so that they can learn more effectively.

Therefore, the key theme of this year’s conference focuses on new ways to enhance student learning through e-assessment, and will address topics such as using student contributions to online discussions as assessment tools; the key obstacles to widespread adoption of e-assessment in higher education across the UK, and effective ways to mitigate the emerging threat of remotely administered online exams being compromised by identity fraud.

The keynote address will be delivered by Dr Paul Brna, Educational Consultant, who will focus on the importance of using e-assessment to provide feedback to learners and to make it a major part of personalised learning.

“Students want more and more feedback,â€? said Denise Whitelock, IET, CAA Conference Chair. “Therefore we want to make assessment more bespoke so that academics are more focused and effective and all students get some level of feedback. When students get feedback, they become more reflective learners.â€?

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

In what is believed also to be a world-first, ECS has become the UK’s first University department to release all its public data in open linked data format.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is at the forefront of the open linked data initiative through the work of its Professors Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt.

Now, in accordance with the spirit of the initiative, ECS has released all its own data for public reuse. This includes data about research papers in the EPrints archive (announced this in the official global rankings as one of the top ten in the world), people in the School, research groups, teaching modules, seminars and events, buildings and rooms.

All public (RDF) data from rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk and eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk is now available and can be reused for any legal purpose, including derivative works and commercial use. The School has opted for a creative commons public domain (CC0) license to allow the data to be reused.

Christopher Gutteridge, ECS Web Projects Manager, comments: “We believe that in the future this will become common practice for certain types of open data, and it is our responsibility to lead the way in setting the standards of best practice.â€?

“We have decided not to make attribution of our data a legal requirement, as this makes it difficult to create large scale mashups.

“So, rather than ‘MUST attribute’, our policy is ‘please attribute’. Obviously an attribution would be nice, but we don’t want to restrict innovation by requiring it under all circumstances.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt comments: “The University of Southampton has pioneered some of the most important developments in the Semantic Web and Open Access in recent years. This announcement will ensure more data is released in the right format to enable new innovative uses of the information.

“This kind of open data policy will become the standard by which all public institutions are judged. Working with the UK government over the past year Tim Berners-Lee and I have been looking to change everyone’s attitude to data. Publicly-held non-personal data is now being released all over the country and as this continues we’ll see innovation to exploit it and applications that use it.’

All the ECS information released is already available as HTML on the School’s websites. Contact details of people are only included if they have previously opted into the University's public directory.

“What’s new about what we are doing now is that by providing the RDF we are making it possible for other computers to understand the information,â€? says Christopher.

“We have no idea how people will reuse our data,â€? he adds, “but we are excited to find out!

More information on the available data from ECS: http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/docs/

Over the summer the School plans to make the ECS SPARQL endpoint available to the public as part of its supported website features such as RSS or iCalendar files. In the near future SPARQL will be used to build parts of the School’s own websites.

“We’ve found the process of ‘eating our own dogfood’ very educational,â€? says Christopher, “since it has resolved many issues with our RDF data which we would not have otherwise been aware of. We are already using this in a limited way to dynamically build http://www.southampton-nanofab.com/about/news/ and http://www.southampton-nanofab.com/research/researchprojects.php using the SPARQL.

The ECS data can be explored in a browser here: http://graphite.ecs.soton.ac.uk/sparqlbrowser/?endpoint=http://rdf.ecs.soton.ac.uk/sparql/

ECS has provided RDF data for around five years.

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

Over 200 students will attend Graduation ceremonies this week to receive University of Southampton degrees gained in the School of Electronics and Computer Science.

The students will graduate at two ceremonies to be held on Friday 16 July: at 9.30 am for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations; and at 4.45 pm for degrees in Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering. The ceremonies will be followed at 10.30 am and 5.45 pm by Graduation Receptions for graduates and their guests, to be held in the University's Reception Marquee (morning ceremony), which is situated in front of the Students' Union; and in the Garden Court (afternoon ceremony).

Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of School, will tell graduates: "All of us who know ECS know that it is a unique place and that it is the members of our community who make it so. For the last three or four years you have been an integral part of that community as much as any of the researchers and teachers whose work contributes to the School’s international reputation."

The majority of students graduating from ECS have already found jobs, despite the difficult economic conditions. Excellent employability figures for the School's graduates were a contributing factor in the School's outstanding league table results this year, and with many companies already booking for the ECS Careers Fair in February 2011, prospects for future graduates also look excellent.

Congratulations to all ECS students graduating this week!

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