An ECS student who graduated in July with First Class Honours has won the title of Best Electronic Engineering Student in Europe.

At a ceremony held in the London Hilton on Friday 3 September, Steffi Sesuraj was awarded the ARM Award for Best Electronic Engineering Student, one of the prestigious European SET (Science, Engineering and Technology) Student of the Year Awards 2010.

Steffi was nominated by her supervisor, Professor Darren Bagnall, of the Nano Research Group in the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, on the basis of her excellent performance on the BEng Electronic Engineering course, but especially for her third-year project on the development of more efficient solar cells: ‘Design, Fabrication and Characterisation of a Nano-Plasmonic back reflector for a-Si Thin Film Solar Cells’.

According to Professor Bagnall, Steffi’s experimental work has demonstrated for the first time that plasmonic arrays of metal nanoparticles can be used to significantly improve the performance of solar cells.

"Researchers have been attracted to the idea of using metal nanoparticles to provide ‘plasmonic solar cells’ for around six years," says Professor Bagnall. "Now, as a result of Steffi’s detailed and innovative work we are now much better placed to demonstrate working plasmonic solar cells. This is a considerable achievement since it has provided a new method for how the cells should be constructed."

Steffi will now develop this project in her doctoral research supervised by Professor Bagnall in the ECS Nano research group, using the advanced technology in Southampton Nanofabrication Centre. Her aim will be to use nanotechnology to engineer a design for thinner and therefore more cost-effective solar cells that maintain high efficiency.

"Working on developing a Nano-Plasmonic Back Reflector was definitely an exciting venture for me,â€? says Steffi. “The field of plasmonic application for solar cells has demonstrated that nanotechnology is no more a ‘thing of the future’– it has the potential to be implemented in the present, on a large-scale basis.

"This project was a wonderful opportunity to work with the ECS Nano group. Its members are very talented and friendly and made me feel part of the group.

"I definitely got a lot out of the project in terms of scientific knowledge and research skills. The enthusiasm which I’ve developed for plasmonics applications and nanotechnology in general has motivated me to continue with a PhD in this area, at the Nano group, under Professor Darren Bagnall and my co-supervisor Dr Harold Chong.

"I’ve constantly been on the move in my life, from India to the Netherlands and now Southampton. I feel at home in this University and look forward to another four exciting and fruitful years of research."

The SET European Awards were presented at a ceremony before an audience comprising of hundreds of technology students, academics, senior industry executives; as well as senior figures from government, scientific and technical institutions and the media. Another Southampton student received an award at the event: The Laing O'Rourke Award for the Best Civil Engineering Student was won by Joseph Scurrah for his project on Offshore Wind Turbine Foundation Loads.

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Steffi Sesuraj is a member of the Nano research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in doing PhD research in this group you can find out more on our Postgraduate Admissions Pages.

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

After advising the UK Government on the release of huge quantities of public data, ECS Professor Nigel Shadbolt is now encouraging people to come up with innovative ways of putting the data to use.

Professor Shadbolt is one of the panellists of judges in the OpenUp competition which is searching for the best ideas for information services that use government data. Anyone is invited to contribute – parents, students, businesspeople, GPs, local government officers – in fact anyone who has ever needed to use a piece of government information.

Data.gov.uk, the public data website launched in January 2010 as a result of the work of University of Southampton Professors Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has provided huge amounts of information and statistics on business, crime, education, transport, health, and housing, but it is not yet available in ways that make it easy for the general public to access or use.

The OpenUp competition is offering a top prize of £1000 and £50,000 for subsequent development for the best idea which will then be developed into an application.

Professor Shadbolt told Computer Weekly: “We have lots of data becoming available and the obvious question is what value is there locked up in this data? Governments and businesses are not always the best places to go to find out the answer.â€?

Improving knowledge of their environment and services for UK citizens has been a driving force in the data release, but the positive effects for business of releasing the data are also a driving force.

Earlier this year Professors and Shadbolt commented in The Guardian: “Re-use of data in new - and often unexpected - ways creates both social value and opportunities for economic growth. It's not our job to say where data might be useful; it's our job to unleash it and allow businesses and independent developers to build innovative services which they can then deliver to users.â€?

The OpenUp competition is created and funded by The Stationery Office to generate greater widespread interest in information now publicly available through data.gov.uk. TSO want to encourage the British public “To mash up public data for the greater good of your communityâ€? and demonstrate significant benefits of how this information can be put to use for the UK public now that it is open to all.

The panel of judges include experts with experience of business, government and the media, including Charles Arthur, Technology Editor of The Guardian, and Emma Mulqueeny, Founding Director of Rewired State Ltd. _____

Professor Nigel Shadbolt is a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science; if you are interested in PhD research in the group, see our Postgraduate Admissions pages for further information.

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

Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the pioneers of the Open Access (OA) movement worldwide, will be reporting on metrics to evaluate the impact of peer-reviewed research papers, at three conferences in Europe this month.

This week, Professor Harnad, from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), will deliver a keynote on Friday (10 September) on 'Open Research metrics and the Open Access advantage' at Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands.

In his keynote, he will point out that as peer-reviewed research literature becomes openly accessible online, the era of open research metrics is approaching. He will present data on the open access citation advantage as well as methodological recommendations for validating metrics.

"Scientometrics will also include semiometrics, derived from full-text data-mining, and chronometrics will track, analyze and project metrics across time,� he will say. "Existing metrics will also need to be used as an incentive to induce researchers to provide the missing open access content." At a public meeting of university and funding council policy-makers in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 3 September, 'Mandating (Green) Open Access to Maximize the Usage and Impact of Danish Research', Professor Harnad presented the findings of the Houghton Report showing that if all Danish research were self-archived, it would save Denmark over two hundred million DK, with a benefit/cost ratio of over 10 to 1. It also found that OA enhances research usage and impact by 25-250 percent.

Next week (13-14 September), at euroCRIS, the annual Current Research Information Systems seminar in Brussels, Professor Harnad will also talk about analysing the impact of research archived in institutional repositories, a topic which will be acknowledged by the conference as one which is becoming increasingly important.

In a presentation entitled 'Institutional Repositories for Open Access: Mandates Deposit Policies', he will discuss why it is that although over 90 per cent of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving by their authors, only about 20 per cent of authors go ahead and do it.

"As the studies by OA researchers such as Alma Swan and Bo-Christer Björk have shown, although academic researchers know and value the benefits of OA, just as with ‘publish or perish’, they will not provide OA spontaneously; they will do so only if OA is mandated by their institutions and funders," said Professor Harnad. "A decade of evidence has now shown that to keep waiting for OA to be provided by a spontaneous ‘people's’ impetus is to keep waiting in vain."

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

ECS is hosting a conference which will report on new developments in the fast evolving field of system design and verification within the electronics industry.

Forum for Design Languages (FDL), which will be held at the University of Southampton from 14 to 16 September is a well-established international forum devoted to the dissemination of research results, and new ideas in the design, modelling and verification of integrated circuits, complex hardware/software embedded systems, and mixed-technology systems.

The conference is being held in the UK for the first time ever and will focus on new methods for developing fast, efficient and reliable system design for the electronics industry.

Four key related themes will be explored: Inheritance and Modelling; Power and Performance Optimisation; Efficient Analysis and Simulation of SystemC Model, and Synthesis for System on Chip and Beyond.

All these themes are of direct relevance to more efficient system design for the electronics industry and conference delegates will be reporting interesting new ideas on the use of energy harvesting and sensor networks in the automotive industry.

Conference chair, Dr Tom Kazmierski of the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science’s, says: "We are very pleased to host FDL 2010 in Southampton this year. Much of the electronics design industry is based here in the UK and it is a good location to attract international participation.

"We are particularly excited about virtual access to FDL. In fact, one of the keynote presentations will make use of virtual conferencing technology and will be given by a speaker residing in The Netherlands. For the first time ever FDL has enabled virtual participation in addition to real-life presentations. We are expecting a real explosion of virtual conferences over the next few years worldwide and want to be in the forefront of this new, next generation solution to disseminating research results quickly and to wide audiences."

FDL 2010 will be held at the University of Southampton from 14 to 16 September 2010 and will be the thirteenth FDL conference following a series of highly successful events that took place in Lausanne, Lyon, Tübingen, Marseilles, Frankfurt am Main, Lille, Darmstadt, Barcelona, Stuttgart and Sophia Antipolis. FDL is organized in technical cooperation with the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Design Automation (TCDA) and IET in the UK. FDL papers will be available online via IEEEXplore after the conference.

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

An ECS academic has won his third major award of the year for his development of accessible technologies, including an open source Web application which transforms learning for all students, including those with disabilities.

Dr Mike Wald of the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has been named runner-up in the Individual Award category in this year's Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Learning Technologist of the Year Award, which is being announced today (Thursday 9 September) at the ALT conference in Nottingham.

Dr Wald will receive the award for the development of the innovative Synote annotation system.

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.

The ALT judges were impressed by the wide applicability of the Synote product and its extensive tagging facilities.

They commented: “Mike led the development of the Synote system […], a free Web application used to transform learning from recorded teaching materials for all students including disabled, dyslexic and second language students. This builds on 10 years of work on speech recognition and is in use in a number of universities in the UK, Europe, and worldwide.â€?

Earlier this year Dr Wald won a National Teaching Fellowship awarded by the Higher Education Academy for his work in accessible technologies, which also recognised his work on Synote and described it as a tool “used by universities worldwide to transform learning for all studentsâ€?.

Dr Wald also won a University of Southampton Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award this year for his inspirational, innovative teaching in this field.

Commenting on these achievements, Dr Wald said: "It’s great to have my work recognised through all these awards, and I look forward to this encouraging more teachers, universities and students to use Synote at www.synote.org." ___

Dr Mike Wald is a member of the Learning Societies Lab in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in doing PhD research in this group, you will find more information on our Postgraduate Admissions Pages.

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

Over 220 prospective students and parents visited the School last week on the University of Southampton autumn open days.

The students and parents were able to hear subject presentations, tour the School and the labs, hear a lecture on robotics in ECS and talk to staff and students at our drop-in session.

While those prospective students will be applying to enter the School in 2011 or 2012, preparations are now advanced for the arrival of 266 new undergraduate students in Computer Science, IT in Organisations, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electromechanical Engineering and Electronic Engineering.

The JumpStart Induction Week, organized by final-year students Darius Aliabadi and Ash Browning, takes place between 27 September and 1 October and aims to ensure that new students settle into the School, University, and Southampton as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

In addition to new undergraduate students, the School will also be welcoming over 300 new MSc students, taking one of 11 intensive one-year postgraduate courses, including the new MSc programme in Energy and Sustainability with Electrical Power Engineering. The MSc students also have their own JumpStart programme, including a boat trip on Southampton Water.

‘We have a great week of events planned,’ said Darius, ‘ranging from formal and informal presentations, to competitions, social events, free food and lots more. JumpStart is a great way for students to acclimatize to their new environment and especially to get to know their tutor group before the work starts.’

The School's official student society - ECSS, Electronics and Computer Science Society, also plays a large part in the organization of the JumpStart week, hosting its own events as a prelude to its busy programme of talks, careers events and socials, which take place throughout the year.

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

As part of the Royal Society’s 350 anniversary celebrations a two-day discussion meeting on Web Science will take place in London on 27 and 28 September. The Royal Society discussion meetings address the major scientific questions of the 21st century, aiming to identify and map out vital subjects that will help set the agenda for future generations of scientists.

‘Web Science: A New Frontier’ is organized by Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Professor James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Professor Bill Dutton of the University of Oxford.

Professors Shadbolt, Hall and Hendler are all Directors of the Web Science Trust, which was established in 2009 to advance education and research in Web Science for the public benefit.

The Royal Society meeting will address pertinent questions. The World Wide Web has changed almost every aspect of modern life. It touches us all. The Web's billions of pages, links and other resources comprise the largest information fabric in the history of humanity. Yet the Web is rarely approached as an object of scientific study.

What processes have driven the Web's growth, and will they persist? How does large-scale structure emerge from a simple set of protocols? How does the Web work as a socio-technical system? What drives the viral uptake of certain Web phenomena? What might fragment the Web? The interdisciplinary meeting will discuss these and other issues as it presents the components of a Science of the Web.

Although registration for the event has now closed, those who want to join in the event will be able to do so through a live webcast on RoyalSociety.tv The majority of the presentations will then be available to view on demand at RoyalSociety.tv with slides approximately three weeks after the meeting end.

During the live webcast, viewers will be encouraged to interact with the discussion meeting using Twitter hash tag #RSWebSci. Bill Thompson will be acting as a special Twitter chair, and will be posing some of questions that have been tweeted.

To be informed when the presentations are available, please register for the waiting list without ticking any days to attend.

Speakers at the event include: Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Manuel Castells, Dr Jennifer Chayes Professor Ramesh Jain, Lord Robert May of Oxford, Professor David Karger, Dr Anne-Marie Kermarrec. Professor Jon Kleinberg, Professor Pierre Levy, Professor Helen Margetts, Professor Henrietta Moore, Professor David Robertson, Professor Luis von Ahn, Professor Jianping Wu, Professor Jonathan Zittrain

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

Engineers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science will unveil new technologies to improve communications in ‘danger zones’ at a symposium in Farnborough next week.

The outcomes of the ALADDIN research programme (Autonomous Learning Agents for Decentralised Data and Information Networks) will be presented at a final research symposium at the Park Centre in Farnborough on Monday 27 September.

ALADDIN is a multi-million pound multidisciplinary research project led by Professor Nick Jennings from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who heads the world’s largest agents research group, and funded by BAE Systems and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It involves research groups in the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, and Imperial College London.

Focusing on developing techniques and technology to overcome the challenges facing different agencies involved in an emergency response, ALADDIN is considered a best-practice project by the EPSRC.

Over five years of research the ALADDIN partnership has developed new techniques for building decentralised autonomous systems in highly uncertain dynamic environments. It has made it possible to deploy systems of autonomous agents which can plan and reason and pass information to one another without direct human control. During the research project, the partnership developed three demonstrators which show how ALADDIN algorithms work in disaster response situations:

• A situational awareness demonstrator involving weather sensors.

• A disaster rescue simulation, considering how agents could operate and communicate with one another in a disaster scenario like an earthquake.

• A building evacuation simulator, involving the use of autonomous agents in a disaster scenario in a tower block or on a boat. The agent’s job here is to get people to safety.

“As the largest agents group in the world, what we are particularly known for here at Southampton is applying the research to real world environments,â€? says Professor Nick Jennings. “The ALADDIN project has developed autonomous agents which will make decisions on their own without direct human control and can then interact with other similar autonomous agents to get things done.â€?

“We have done some really groundbreaking work on the development and use of autonomous agents in decentralised systems,â€? says Simon Case, BAE Systems. “The challenge in practice is to detect whether the information coming from each agent is accurate or to be able to ascertain if it is not reliable.â€?

ALADDIN outputs have already been used in various customer communities, including weapon assignments, resource management in the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAV) sector, and more recently, for an instinct programme for Detica and the Home Office.

ALADDIN has won many awards, including The Engineer award for the 'best aerospace and defence project' in 2009.

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The ALADDIN project is based in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in this group, you can find out more information on our Research pages.

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

Over 650 students enrolled in the School of Electronics and Computer Science today, on a wide range of programmes critical to the development of future technological capabilities in research and industry.

Around 300 students enrolled on the School’s prestigious MSc programmes, covering software engineering, electronic engineering and nanotechnology, wireless communications, Web science, and Web technologies. Vishnu Nair, from Chennai, India, is taking the MicroElectroMechanical Systems course. He decided to come to Southampton because of its premier position in Electronic Engineering, but on his first trip to the UK he is finding the climate very different from home. ‘I’m used to temperatures of 30C,’ he said, ‘and am finding it very cold!’ But he added: ‘It’s really great to be here and the University Campus is very beautiful.’ Vishnu is planning to work part-time to help finance his degree programme.

Yang Tianran from Yibin in central China is taking the Microelectronic Systems Design course. ‘I came to ECS because it has a very good reputation in Electronics,’ he said. ‘I want to get a qualification that will help me find a good job afterwards, either in the UK, or back in China.’

The MSc students have had a week’s induction programme to the School and University, which included a boat trip on Tuesday on Southampton Water. ‘We are delighted to see so many students choosing the MSc programme in ECS,’ said Professor Darren Bagnall, Programme Director. ‘Each year, it gets harder to get on the programme and it is a great to welcome students from so many different parts of the world who want to do postgraduate study in ECS.’

Over 260 undergraduate students registered on the six main degree programmes in the School: Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT in Organisations, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering. Around 25 per cent of undergraduate students are from outside the UK/EU. 'We are very pleased to see such a large number of high-achieving students entering the School against continuing high demand for all our programmes,' said Dr Andy Gravell, Director of Undergraduate Studies. 'We hope that all our new students have a wonderful experience here in ECS and the University, and are successful in their studies.'

Around 70 new PhD students also enrolled in the School this week, with another 80 expected to register for PhD studies later in the year.

The University term begins officially on Monday 4 October.

A major two-day conference held this week at the Royal Society was a huge success for Web Science and for the organizers, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Professor Bill Dutton of Oxford University, and Professor James Hendler, of Rensselaer Polytechnic University.

A capacity audience, with thousands also participating in the live Webcast, heard a succession of distinguished speakers demonstrate the impact of the Web on all parts of modern life. Speakers also considered different ways of modelling the Web, and the huge value that the Web is bringing to better knowledge and information about communications, networks and social relationships.

‘It’s very neat that the Royal Society chose Web Science for one of its 350th anniversary events,’ said Tim Berners-Lee. ‘We’ve only been talking about Web Science for four years, and this event is a measure of the impact we’ve had. The auditorium was packed with people from all disciplines, talking about the Web from many different angles, and this is what we need to be able study the Web.’ ‘Web Science: A new frontier’ was one of a small series of events chosen by the Royal Society to highlight the important scientific questions of the 21st century during its anniversary year.

Speakers included Nigel Shadbolt, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bob May, Jennifer Chayes, Jon Kleinberg, Jianping Wu, David Robertson, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, David Karger, Pierre Levy, Manuel Castells, Helen Margetts, Luis von Ahn, Ramesh Jain, Noshir Contractor, Jonathan Zittrain, and Tim Berners-Lee.

Writing on BBC News Technology, Bill Thompson described the event as: ‘...a lot of fun and inordinately stimulating’. He noted: ‘As the conference progressed we moved from mathematical analyses to engineering, the social web and an exploration of the future of web technologies ... I first heard about web science three or four years ago, when I bumped into Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University and he pulled me to one side to tell me about his plans to model the growth of the web and how he believed it would help us begin to see the web as a complex ecosystem of humans and machines, worthy of study in its own right.

‘At the time I was sceptical, but I'm becoming more convinced that it is worth pulling together people from the many disciplines assembled at this conference and helping them to see how they all hold different pieces of the puzzle, and that the Web Science Trust is doing an important job at this critical time in the emergence of the networked world.’

The whole programme can be viewed on RoyalSociety.tv

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