Despite disappointing national figures published today on graduate employment prospects, more employers than ever before will be attending the School of Electronics and Computer Science Careers Fair on 2 February 2011.

Over recent years job prospects for students in the School have been outstanding, with a record figure announced this year of 97.5 per cent employment for graduates of Electronics or Electrical Engineering, and a figure of 92.5 per cent for Computer Science and IT. The School has a strong engagement programme with local, national and international companies, and aims to ensure that all its students are aware of the opportunities available to develop their skills and awareness of career opportunities as they progress through their degree programme.

‘It’s essential that we produce graduates who have the skills and understanding to play an effective role in developing future technologies,’ says Professor Alun Vaughan, Deputy Head of School (Education). ‘As a School we have worked hard over recent years to ensure that our courses are providing our students with the skills needed in the workplace. We also place a very high value on our employer liaison activity, including our annual Careers Fair and our Careers Hub web site.

‘Our employer liaison activity enables students to work closely with companies who can sponsor projects and course modules, to take up summer internships and work placements in vacations, and to have the best possible information about employment opportunities.

'ECS students are very much in demand by employers for the breadth of their technical understanding, and also because the unique qualities of the ECS programmes ensure that our students will be able to maximize their potential.'

The School’s 2011 Careers Fair will be held on Wednesday 2 February and over 40 companies have already booked places. To find out more, or to become affiliated to our Careers Hub, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

ECS graduate Ben Dowling recently co-launched a new company, Geomium, which aims to give users complete awareness of their surroundings, allowing them to find nearby bars, restaurants and cafes, events, local deals, and even other users in the neighbourhood.

Geomium – ‘Live Local.Live Social’, is a location-based service which has already been praised by The Guardian, and has attracted positive reviews from the tech media. It adds a real-time social element to data from established location review services like Yelp and Qype to create something new.

‘We aimed to make this social,’ says Ben, ‘so users can see the events their friends are attending, meet new people at the bar they happen to be in, and see what people are saying about the latest bar in town.’

Ben graduated in 2006 with an MEng Software Engineering degree. ‘The experience was invaluable,’ he says, ‘and contained so much that has been of practical use.’ He also worked in ECS as a research intern for two summers, which he says was a great opportunity to apply some of the things he learned in a working environment.

After graduating Ben worked for Mendeley for a few years as a Lead Developer before leaving to launch Geomium, which he co-founded with Michael Ferguson, an MBA graduate from Oxford University. Geomium was placed third in the TechCruch European summer battle, before launching officially in early October.

Geomium is the first location-based service to combine real-time functionality with unrivalled local content. For example, Ben and Michael told The Guardian on launch day: ‘If you get off the tube at say Oxford Circus, you can see which of your mates are in Soho and which bars have 2-for-1 deals that night.’

Geomium is available worldwide, but the team are currently focusing their efforts on the UK. It is currently available online and on iPhone, and Android and Blackberry support will be added soon.

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

We are living in an age of superabundant information. The Internet and World Wide Web have been the agents of this revolution, producing a deluge of information and data which has led to a range of scientific discoveries and engineering innovations.

In this invited talk at the Royal Society, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will discuss the technologies and challenges of a newly emerged Web - the Web of Linked Data, The Linked Data Web is driven by the release of large sets of data into the public domain and offers new opportunities for science, government and business.

Over the last 18 months Professor Shadbolt has been working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee to develop Open Data technology and policy for the UK government, including data.gov.uk His research is directed to the development of the next generation Web and the establishment of Web Science.

In this talk, which is part of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary programme, Professor Shadbolt will also address the challenges of the new Web: How will we ensure the quality and integrity of these information assets? How do we respect and protect our privacy in a world of increasingly interconnected data? And how will these fast-moving developments impact all aspects of our lives?

This event, at the Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, Tuesday 16 November, is free of charge and no booking or tickets are required. Doors open at 5.45 pm and seats will be allocated on a first-come-first served basis. The talk begins at 7.30 pm and will be broadcast live on royalsociety.org/live

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

Professor Nigel Shadbolt is part of the Web Science 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 information on our Research pages.

The need for more transparency in Web-based information systems has been highlighted by an academic at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.

In a paper entitled 'The Foundations for Provenance on the Web', published in the journal 'Foundations and Trends in Web Science', Professor Luc Moreau points out that due to the complex flows of information on the Web, it is not always clear where information originates from.

“This is a challenge since we want to be able to establish the exact source of information, we want to decide whether information has been altered, and by whom, we want to corroborate and possibly reproduce such information, and ultimately we want to decide whether the information comes from a trustworthy source,â€? said Professor Moreau.

According to Professor Moreau, the solution lies in ‘provenance’, a term used in diverse areas such as art, archaeology and palaeontology, which describes the history of an object since its creation. Its main focus is to establish that the object has not been forged or altered, and the same can be done with computer-generated data.

“Understanding where data comes from will enable users to decide if it’s trustworthy. This will also lead to a new generation of services over the Web, capable of producing trusted information,â€? Professor Moreau added. In his paper, Professor Moreau reviews several approaches that adopt provenance, allowing their actions and information flows to be audited, and their compliance with or violation of rules and policies to be determined. These strong capabilities - information transparency, auditing capabilities and compliance detection - provide users with the means to decide whether they can trust systems and information. “A powerful argument for provenance is that it can help make systems transparent,â€? said Professor Moreau. “Our aim, with the community of researchers, is to establish a standard method to ascertain the provenance of information on the Web.â€?

A copy of the paper: Luc Moreau (2010) The Foundations for Provenance on the Web, Foundations and Trends® in Web Science: Vol. 2: No 2-3, pp 99-241 can be accessed at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21691/

Professor Luc Moreau is a member of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in this group, you will find more information on our PG Admissions pages.

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

ECS research is playing an important role in an ingenious new campaign called Fix the Web, being launched this week to tackle the problem of inaccessible websites on a massive scale. Fix the Web is an initiative of Citizens Online, a national charity that campaigns for internet access for all.

The Internet has been a liberating force in the lives of many disabled people, opening up a wonderful new world of communication, ideas and networks. In theory, it should have created a level playing field.

Unfortunately, millions of disabled and older people are excluded from easily navigating their way around the web. To compound the problem, it is often difficult to complain about the offending sites. Fix the Web has been launched to provide a quick and easy way for people to make complaints. It also introduces a volunteer-led process for those complaints to be reported back to website owners to get fixed.

The reporting process for a disabled person will take less than a minute and is easily done through a form on the site: http://ww.fixtheweb.net, via twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem) or by emailing post@fixtheweb.net. The new campaign incorporates the open source cross-browser toolbar developed to enhance accessibility of the World Wide Web by researchers in the Learning Societies Lab of ECS with funding from JISC TechDis/ The toolbar has been renamed ATBar and is available as a bookmarklet and download. The development team of Sebastian Skuse, Technical Project Assistant Learning Societies Lab of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan have collaborated with 'Fix the Web' led by Citizens Online and funded by Nominet Trust.

There is now a 'Fix the Web' button that launches a report form that can be used to make comments about inaccessible websites. "Volunteers take the reports through a short process to check them and will then send them on to website owners, with information about web accessibility," said EA Draffan. The idea of the toolbar has also been supported by JISC-funded OSS Watch who provide advice and guidance on the use, development, and licensing of free and open source software. The team aim to build a community around the project and take it forward through their recently awarded JISC REALISE project.

Over the last five months the ECS researchers have recorded over 1.8 million 'toolbar hits' on ATBar.

A researcher in the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science has just received funding to develop new approaches to data modelling and model-free data processing.

Dr Ivan Markovsky, who has devoted most of his career to numerical methods for data modelling, has been awarded a prestigious Starting Grant of€783,000 from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop his approach further. The (ERC) Starting Grants are awarded to excellent early career researchers to enable them to devote their time fully to research.

Dr Markovsky’s research has the unique aim of unifying and simplifying the growing number of data modelling methods and making them more easily applicable. “Data modelling is the only problem that is common to all areas of science and engineering,â€? said Dr Markovsky. “Moreover, models are often the bottleneck in applications. However, current data modelling knowledge is rather fragmented and repetitive.â€?

The central concept of his work is a mathematical problem, called structured low-rank approximation, which includes many applications and existing methods. “It is amazing that a diverse list of applications can be formulated and solved as a single core mathematical problem,â€? said Dr Markovsky.

A high-gain, high-risk objective of the project is model-free data processing, which bypasses the modelling stage and goes straight to the final goal, thus tackling the problem as a whole.

“Our research suggests ways to merge data modelling with model-based data processing, which allows us to skip the modelling step. This approach has been tried before but it is not efficient yet and needs more work,â€? Dr Markovsky added.

If successful, the research will have impact on applications in acoustics, biomedical signal processing, and bioinformatics.

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Dr Markovsky is a member of the Information: Signals, Images, Systems research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking 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.

First-year ECS undergraduate Andrew Cowan will be taking part in this weekend’s Design and Technology with ICT Show at the NEC Birmingham (18-20 November), displaying his prize-winning ‘Search and Rescue Robot’.

Andrew built the robot during his A level Systems and Control coursework at Sutton Grammar School. The large tracked vehicle for use in disaster zones has a wireless camera (with tilt, pan and zoom), and a collection of wireless sensors including gas sampling. About 20 microchips control all the sensors, radio links and functions (including lights, a siren and water cannon). Powerful enough to pull a car, the robot weighs around 80kg and is powered by two 750W motors. ‘I wanted to design and build something for my A-level Systems and Control coursework that would be challenging and complex enough to be my hobby for my two A level years,’ he says, ‘as well as building something socially useful.’ He financed the robot by negotiating sponsorship of parts with 12 different companies (whose logos appear on the sides) and used part of an Arkwright Scholarship.

Andrew entered the robot for the National Science & Engineering Competition 2010, and won both 1st prize in the engineering intermediate age category, and the Siemens Award. He was selected to represent the UK at the EU Contest for Young Scientists, taking place in Lisbon in September 2010 but had to turn down that opportunity since it coincided with the ECS Jumpstart Week! In July, he won 1st prize (senior age category) at the Young Engineer for Britain SE Regional Final, which has qualified him to go through to the Young Engineer for Britain final in March 2011. In September, he was also awarded a Crest Gold Award for his work on the robot (with the Crest finals also next March).

Andrew is being sponsored through his ECS course on Electronic Engineering with Mobile and Secure Systems by Cobham Technical Services and worked for the company over the summer at ERA Technology in Leatherhead. He is happy with his choice of ECS for undergraduate work: ‘Southampton was my first choice of university, not only because of its excellent reputation for electronics, but also because when I came here for interview the department seemed so dynamic and inspiring.

‘Perhaps this is because it is based within the ECS School, rather than a more traditional engineering department. The modern facilities in the ECS were also an attraction, as was the sailing at Southampton. I 'm now teaching sailing at the sailing club on Wednesdays.

‘The course, as any Electronics student will tell you, has long hours and is hard work, but I'm greatly enjoying it.’

When he graduates he will take up employment with Cobham, working in their Electronics Systems Unit in Leatherhead, on leading-edge technology for the design and development of antenna and wireless communication systems. His project over the summer involved working on the development of a robotic vehicle for detecting land mines using ground-penetrating radar. ‘It was great to put the skills I had learnt during the construction of my A level coursework to use in a commercial application,’ he says..

Coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of when the World Wide Web went live on his desktop, ECS Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has issued a powerful warning of threats to the Web’s egalitarian principles – particularly from social networking sites and Government, and wireless Internet providers.

Writing in Scientific American this week, ‘Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality’, Berners-Lee warns that it is the Web users who might lose the freedom to connect to Web sites if, for example, social networking sites continue to block access to information provided by their users.

Berners-Lee believes that free speech will be the ultimate cost of business enterprises breaking up the Web into small unconnected fragmented islands and urges users to take action: ‘Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.’

Berners-Lee identifies universality as one of Web’s key principles, providing people with the freedom to link to anything, regardless of hardware, software, or Internet connection. He also cites decentralization, which has made innovation possible. Specific threats to universality come from cable television companies that might limit their users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social networking sites too are causing problems by holding information about their members which isn’t transferable between sites, ‘locking-in’ large amounts of data.

Berners-Lee commends open standards, especially improvements to standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, which he leads; he writes about the separation of the Web and the Internet, and about electronic human rights, including privacy.

Looking to the future Berners-Lee commends the use of linked data and the huge advantages it will bring to science and research. He ends on a positive note: ‘Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium; Director of the World Wide Web Foundation; Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Departments, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Over the last 18 months, Professor Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton have been working as Transparency and Open Data Advisers to UK Government, helping to free up central and local government data of all kinds, and creating the web site data.gov.uk

Professor Berners-Lee is a founder Director of the Web Science Trust, established in 2009 to raise awareness of Web Science and to build the foundation and framework for this important new discipline. The University of Southampton Web Science Doctoral Training Centre provides fully-funded studentships for the four-year MSc/PhD programme in Web Science.

See more coverage of this story.

A team of scientists from the University of Southampton, Royal Holloway, London, and the Institute of Zoology at London Zoo have been researching the social butterfly effect - studying how we change our friends throughout our lives.

They are interested in the fact that, despite the fleeting nature of many of our relationships, we often form cliques - circles of friends that are often friendly with each other. This could help us to understand why our society is made up of so many groups, from political to sporting.

The study looks at how we often form friendships with people who are similar with us in some way. This could mean having a similar profession, interest, hobby, religion or political affiliation. It showed how cliques form around common shared interests, such as being fans of the same football club or the latest pop sensation on the X Factor, or perhaps more pointedly having similar opinions on the politics of the Middle East.

The study, Stability in flux: community structure in dynamic networks, by Dr John Bryden, Dr Sebastian Funk (now at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London), Professor Vincent Jansen from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, and Dr Nic Geard and Dr Seth Bullock from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is being published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface today (Wednesday 1 December).

The academics attempted to understand how groups in society may be formed by building a computer model of a social network. Dr John Bryden explains: “This work is interesting because it's one of the first to study social networks where connections between people change. As online social networks have become popular, so scientists have increasingly studied human interaction using networks.â€? He added: “The study could have broad implications. Networks with changing connections are quite common in the natural world, from molecules to brain cells, and many of these networks also form groups." In the model, individuals freely form and break friendship links with others. "We changed the model so that individuals tended to form links with similar others and we saw the cliques start to form,â€? says Dr Funk. The study also went a step further, looking at what happens when peoples' interests change, for example someone might find a new interest or friends might influence one another. Dr Seth Bullock said: "It was fascinating to see how the cliques could form without any one person organising everything. We saw individuals moving from one clique to another. Over time some cliques disappeared while new ones were established.â€? Dr Funk adds: "It was interesting to see that new cliques tended to either fail very quickly or grow and persist for a much longer time, with very few in between.â€?

A video showing the Social Butterfly concept is available on You Tube at: http://www.youtube.com/SocialBtrflyEffect.

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Dr Seth Bullock is Director of the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation at the University of Southampton. If you are interested in PhD opportunities in this group, including fully-funded scholarships, see the Institute's admissions pages.

For further information on this story contact Joyce Lewis

Behaviour and morals online, including this week’s Wikileaks scenario, will be discussed at a workshop on 'Ethics and the World Wide Web', which will be held at the Foyle Centre in the British Library tomorrow (Thursday 2 December).

The workshop is being held as part of the British Library's Growing Knowledge exhibition, and is co-sponsored by The Web Science Trust, which was established in 2009 to advance education and research in Web Science for the public benefit.

The workshop will focus on the fact that although the World Wide Web is the most complex piece of technology ever engineered and has transformed almost every aspect of everyday life, little is known about appropriate ethical behaviour online. The workshop will try to improve our understanding of what that stronger ethic will need to be.

Questions to be explored include:

• Does the Web as an information space need special ethical consideration? • How has the Web changed our moral view of ourselves? • How do moral norms apply to artificial agents? • What are our responsibilities as Web engineers and designers? • What are our responsibilities as website managers and content creators? • Does the Web assume a liberal culture with unrestricted information flow? Can it be adapted to less liberal regimes, and if so, should it? • What norms of behaviour does the Web depend upon? • How should researchers approach open data online? • What is the public’s understanding of “publicâ€? on social networking sites, search facilities and other services? • What should researchers think about when collecting data, analysing it and disseminating their findings?

Dr Kieron O’Hara of the Web Science Trust, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), is keynote speaker at the event. He said: "The Web is a new space and we don't know yet what is right and wrong online. At the workshop, we will question what rights and responsibilities we bring with us to the Web.

“For example, the ethics of this week’s Wikileaks situation are complex and controversial, and no doubt everyone has an opinion. From the point of view of Web Science, the debate extends beyond the rights and wrongs of Wikileaks’ actions, to consider the ways that the use of the Web as a medium has changed the situation.â€?

To explore these issues, the workshop has invited keynote speeches, panel discussions and debate with an invited audience of practising engineers, academic researchers and philosophers.

The keynote speakers, in addition to Kieron O’Hara, are Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford) and Jeroen van den Hoven (Delft University of Technology).

The panellists include:

• Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust) • Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton) • Yorick Wilks (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition/University of Oxford) • David Wright (Trilateral Research) Aleks Krotoski, Researcher-in-Residence, Growing Knowledge, British Library, who will present a session on: 'Introduction to Growing Knowledge: the Evolution of Research' said: "As we learn to navigate the World Wide Web for scholarship, we must take into consideration the people behind the machines. This demands new concepts of research ethics and practice, and a reflection on the relationship between online researcher and virtual participant."

Growing Knowledge – the Evolution of Research (12 October 2010 – 16 July 2011) showcases some never-seen-before research tools, thought-provoking content and futuristic design in a fully interactive research environment. The exhibition aims to challenge audiences on how research is changing and ask what they want to experience from the library of the future. The Library has worked closely with Researcher in Residence, Aleks Krotoski to ensure that visitors will not only experience an exhibition not seen before at the Library but also engage with the ongoing debate about the usefulness of these technologies in tomorrow’s Library.