The first Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences Distinguished Lecture was given this week by Professor David Payne, Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

Describing David Payne as the new Faculty’s ‘greatest asset’, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean, said that he had brought prestige and major research funding to the University and ‘awards, honours and success’. She also paid tribute to his loyalty to the University, which he joined as an undergraduate student in 1963, and to his development and leadership of the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

One of the world’s leading researchers in photonics and fibre lasers, David Payne has undertaken research which has established Southampton as a global force in optical fibre communications and laser technology. He has won a string of awards recognizing his research breakthroughs which have transformed the world’s telecommunications.

In his lecture, entitled ‘Photonics: The Century of Light’, Professor Payne considered the continuing huge potential of optical fibres and the future opportunities this represents for the new Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.

He explained the key role that photonics had played in powering the optical fibre internet with its huge global reach, and examined how this had happened. With no end in sight to the current demand for increased connectivity Professor Payne called for more photonics, reaching further into the network with optics to overcome the existing bottlenecks and employing next-generation optical components.

He also demonstrated that the great success of optical fibres and planar circuits in telecommunications has generated numerous applications in a number of related fields, such as sensing, bio- and nano-photonics and high-power lasers. Incredibly, the same fibres that carry tiny internet signals can also generate kilowatts of power, sufficient to cut through inch-thick steel. Southampton has an enviable track record of innovation in ICT and photonics. Building new technologies and applications through harnessing the properties of new optical materials, devices and structures is, he suggested, a huge opportunity for our new Faculty.

You can watch a video of the lecture at: http://archive.zepler.tv/324/

The next Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences Distinguished Lecture takes place on Thursday 12 May and will be given by Professor Tony Hey, former Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and now Corporate Vice-President for External Research at Microsoft.

Fifty-five of the UK’s leading graduate technology recruiters will be attending the ECS Engineering and Technology Careers Fair on Wednesday 2 February.

Despite the economic downturn, and the current bleak news about graduate recruitment, highly skilled and capable graduates are still very much in demand, and Southampton students have a very strong reputation for the breadth and depth of their knowledge of different technologies, as well as for the strong mix of practical and theoretical understanding gained in their degree programmes.

This year’s Fair, the fourth in the series, is 50 per cent larger than last year’s. Companies attending will be offering graduate recruitment opportunities, as well as summer internships and industrial placements, and aiming to build relationships with students as they progress through their degrees. Many of the companies also sponsor student activities in the School, provide prizes and awards for academic course modules, and pay regular visits to give technology presentations.

Imagination Technologies is one of the country’s leading technology companies and a regular recruiter of ECS graduates, whose skills and knowledge fits well with the company’s needs. Its multimedia and communications semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) cores are at the heart of today's most innovative and exciting consumer electronics products and the company relies on recruiting leading graduates.

“We believe it is critical for industry and universities to work together to mutually benefit,â€? says Raeeka Yassaie of Imagination Technologies. “As a company we are represented on the Industrial Liaison Board in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. This helps us maintain a strong understanding of the teaching ECS delivers and we are also able to advise and influence so that the School can ensure it is producing graduates with the skills that industry needs.

“We attend and sponsor many events each year across UK universities with strong engineering and computing departments, including sponsorship of multiple events and attendance at a number of careers-focused activities in Southampton for ECS."

ECS has one of the UK’s best records for the employability of its graduates. In last year’s University league tables, ECS Electronics and Electrical Engineering employability ranking (indicating the percentage of students in graduate jobs or further training six months after graduation) was 98/97 per cent - the highest in the subject table, and among the top ten rankings in the UK for any subjects (outside Medicine and Healthcare).

“It’s essential that we produce graduates who have the skills and understanding to play an effective role in developing future technologies,â€? 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.

“This 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.â€?

Over 1000 students attended last year's event, and so this year's Fair is already hotly anticipated. The event takes place in the Garden Court, Students' Union, on the Highfield Campus, from 11 am to 3.00 pm on Wednesday 2 February, and is open to all students in the University, with a particular emphasis on engineering and technology degrees.

The Fair brochure with a list of companies attending is here: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/careers/resources/careers_fair_brochure_2011.pdf

For further information about the ECS Careers Fair or the School's careers activity, contact Joyce Lewis

The Mountbatten Building was officially declared open last Friday 28 January by the Rt Hon David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science.

During an event postponed from December when it had to be cancelled because of the heavy snow, Mr Willetts unveiled a commemorative plaque in the Mountbatten Atrium, and then toured the facilities in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre and in the Optoelectronics Research Centre.

He paid tribute to all those who had been involved in the reconstruction of the Mountbatten Building and to the ‘spirit of the University of Southampton’ in ensuring that the new Building is bigger and better than before.

He also announced £7.2M of investment in research that could revolutionize the Internet. Led by Professor David Payne of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, the 'Photonics HyperHighway' project will bring together world-leading scientists from the universities of Southampton and Essex and industry partners, including BBC Research and Development, to pioneer new technologies capable of making broadband internet 100 times faster.

The six-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will look at the way fibre optics are used, and develop new materials and devices to increase internet bandwidth. This will ensure that the Web can cope with rising demand for broadband and the increasing use of services such as internet television and music downloads.

‘Since much of the technology that powers today’s Internet came from right here at the University of Southampton, we’re the obvious people to develop the next generation,’ said Professor David Payne.

Stephen Fry is backing a fantastic, new development that has made the reporting of inaccessible websites a simple, one click process. The Fix the Web project is harnessing volunteer energy to tackle reports of web accessibility problems. Disabled people can now report sites to volunteers using a toolbar, called the ATBar, developed by researchers from the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Recently launched, Fix the Web is already making great progress addressing websites that are inaccessible for disabled and older users. There is an impressive groundswell of support for the campaign, with 388 reported sites and 296 volunteers, 20 sites are already fixed and many more are in progress. Where sites do not get fixed, the project at least aims to significantly raise awareness of the issues, focused on change in the long term.

The process for a disabled person to report an inaccessible site is very simple, taking less than a minute. Quick to set up from www.fixtheweb.net/toolbar the ATBar has a 'Fix the Web' button that launches a report form. Volunteers then take the reports through a checking process and send them on to website owners, with information about web accessibility. Ingeniously designed, the ATBar also incorporates text-resize, Text to Speech, style and reference setting buttons.

Stephen Fry comments: “We all expect a few glitches when we go online, but when it comes to accessibility for disabled and older people, the problem is colossal. Fix the Web is doing something about it in a positive and practical way – I urge you to get involved and help get this problem fixed. Fix the Web gets to the very heart of the problem – it’s pure genius!â€?

The development team of Sebastian Skuse, Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan from the Learning Societies Lab at Southampton, are official partners of Fix the Web led by Citizens Online and funded by the Nominet Trust. Fix the Web is proud to be working in partnership with AbilityNet, Bloor Research, Hanona and Nomensa.

The idea of the toolbar has also been supported by JISC-funded OSS Watch who provide advice on the use, development, and licensing of free 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 six months there have been over 3 million 'toolbar hits' on the ATBar.

There are a number of other easy options for website reporting to Fix the Web: through a form on the site: www.fixtheweb.net, via twitter (#fixtheweb #fail, url and the problem) or by emailing post@fixtheweb though the toolbar is likely to be the fastest option.

As the Internet address system reaches its end, an ECS researcher warns that deployment of the new generation of addresses needs to speed up to maintain Internet services.

With the Internet likely to reach a major milestone at 2.30 this Thursday 3 February, when the very last of the unused IPv4 address space is allocated to Regional Registries, and so on to ISPs, a University of Southampton researcher says that careful planning by developers and engineers, dating back to the mid-1990s, has provided the capability for the Internet to continue to grow beyond the depletion of the original addressing system.

However, Dr Tim Chown of the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, warns that deployment of the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, is still in its infancy, and will need to grow faster to sustain the massive demand for new Internet services.

The IPv4 Internet Protocol has ‘run’ the Internet since its earliest days, using a 32-bit numeric address and providing up to 4 billion unique addresses for hosts or routers. But according to Dr Chown, ‘The Internet has become a victim of its own success meaning that the available IPv4 address is almost depleted.’

‘This doesn’t mean the Internet will stop working,’ he says – ‘far from it! Existing users won't notice a difference, and Internet life will go on. But it’s likely that a market for IPv4 address blocks will form as organizations start trading address space, and more use of address sharing and NAT is inevitable.’

Having recognized the problems that would be caused by the exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses, Dr Chown and colleagues around the world have been working on the next generation of Internet address protocols, IPv6. Dr Chown has been an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which has been working on IPv6 since the mid-1990s. With 128 bits of address space, IPv6 will provide enough addresses for Internet growth for the foreseeable future and enable the Internet to grow in new directions.

“As researchers begin to look into innovative new uses of Internet Protocols for networking billions of new types of devices, in the 'Internet of Things', a new, much larger addressing system for those devices will be vital,â€? says Dr Chown. “The challenge over recent years has been for researchers, developers and vendors to standardise IPv6 and produce products that support its use - and most importantly to devise ways for IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist and work together on today's Internet infrastructure, allowing IPv6 to be gradually introduced while IPv4 continues to operate.â€?

The first UK native leased line using IPv6 was run as far back as 1997 at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). The work carried out by Dr Chown and his colleagues in ECS has ensured that IPv6 has been standardized and that operational experience has been fed into the development process. Today IPv6 support is available in almost all modern router and operating system platforms, including Windows 7, MacOS X and Linux. The data network in ECS runs both IPv4 and IPv6 alongside each other, a method known as dual-stack, and many of the School’s public-facing services including web, mail and DNS are available via IPv6 as well as IPv4. The deployment in ECS has helped validate the IETF protocols and their implementations by showing that IPv6 can be run successfully alongside IPv4 in production networks.

“Today's students will graduate into a world where new IPv4 address space will be very hard to acquire and where IPv6 will be the future. So it's great that we can give them the insight and experience of IPv6 while studying here,â€? says Dr Chown.

Currently only a handful of UK ISPs offer IPv6 to their customers, and the biggest UK production deployment is on JANET, the UK academic network, and some of the universities it serves. IPv6 deployment is growing, but still in its infancy, and will need to grow faster to sustain the massive demand for new Internet services worldwide.

For this reason the Internet Society is working with major Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Cisco, Akamai and others to test IPv6 on World IPv6 Day, scheduled for 8 June 2011. Organizations will be encouraged to make their services available over IPv6 on this day, to evaluate how ready they, and the Internet, are for widespread IPv6 deployment. While Google and Facebook already offer their content via IPv6 in a limited way, this potentially massive test of the Internet infrastructure will be an important day for IPv6.

A new transistor made from graphene - the world’s thinnest material – has been developed by a research team at the University of Southampton in the new world-class Southampton Nanofabrication Centre.

The new transistor achieves a record high-switching performance which will make our future electronic devices - such as PDAs and computers - even more functional and high-performance.

In a paper published in 'Electronics Letters' today (3 February 2011), Dr Zakaria Moktadir of the Nano research group at the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) describes how his research into graphene, a material made from a single atomic layer of carbon, arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb structure, led to the development of graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) with a unique channel structure at nanoscale.

According to Dr Moktadir, in the context of electronics, graphene could potentially replace or at least be used side by side with silicon integrations. "CMOS (Silicon Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) downscaling is reaching its limits and we need to find a suitable alternative,â€? he says. "Other researchers had looked at graphene as a possibility, but found that one of the drawbacks was that graphene’s intrinsic physical properties make it difficult to turn off the current flow."

Dr Moktadir discovered that by introducing geometrical singularities (such as sharp bends and corners) in bilayer graphene nanowires, the current could be turned off efficiently.

According to Professor Hiroshi Mizuta, Head of the Nano group, this engineering approach has achieved an on/off switching ratio 1000 times higher than previous attempts. "Enormous effort has been made across the world to pinch off the channel of GFETs electrostatically, but the existing approaches require either the channel width to be much narrower than 10 nm or a very high voltage to be applied vertically across bilayer graphene layers. This hasn’t achieved an on/off ratio which is high enough, and is not viable for practical use."

Dr Moktadir developed this transistor using the new helium ion beam microscope and a focused gallium ion beam system in the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre, which has some of the best nanofabrication facilities in the world.

"This is a breakthrough in the ongoing quest to develop advanced transistors as we progress beyond our current CMOS technology,â€? said Professor Harvey Rutt, Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. “It will have major implications for next generation computer, communication and electronic systems. Introducing geometrical singularities into the graphene channel is a new concept which achieves superior performance while keeping the GFET structure simple and therefore commercially exploitable.â€? Having created the transistor, Dr Moktadir is now undertaking further research to understand the mechanism which causes the current to stop flowing in the channel, testing its reliability and performance under various noise and temperature conditions.

His paper: 'A U-shaped bilayer graphene channel transistor with a very high Ion/Ioff ratio' is available from Joyce Lewis.

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This research was undertaken in the Nano research group of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking postgraduate research in this group, see our Postgraduate admissions page.

For further information on this news story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

New software which will improve how products are modelled and designed in the embedded software industry has just been released by researchers at the University of Southampton.

Professor Michael Butler, Head of Group in Dependable Systems and Software Engineering at the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has led the release of a new prototype tool which automatically generates software code from high-level models. A second tool, a theory plug-in, will take product modelling to a more advanced stage.

The tools are part of DEPLOY - Industrial Deployment of Advanced System Engineering Methods for High Productivity, a European Commission Information and Technologies FP7 Project. It involves academia and industry working together up to February 2012 to improve industrial development processes which will meet the engineering demands of future systems.

Academic partners – University of Southampton, University of Newcastle, Aabo Akademi University, ETH Zurich, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf - are working with Bosch, Siemens Transportation Systems, Space Systems Finland, SAP, CETIC, ClearSy and Systerel to enable industry to meet more rigorous certification processes.

There is a growing awareness of the importance of formal modelling in the industrial certification process,â€? says Professor Butler. “Software is a vital component of most modern systems yet software engineering is still quite immature in comparison to more established engineering fields. Industry is starting to realise that if they use modelling tools, they can reduce errors in the design of software products and improve reliability.â€?

The software toolkit, named Rodin, is open source and was initially developed in the EU FP6 Rigorous Open Development Environment for Complex Systems (RODIN) project 2004-2007. It is now being exploited further in DEPLOY.

The new releases: The Rodin tools, including the new Theory plug-in and Code Generation plug-in can be downloaded at: www.event-b.org

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If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering research group you can find more information on our Postgraduate Admissions pages.

For more information on this new story contact Joyce Lewis; tel +44(0)23 8059 5453

A project which will make it easier to discover and map online information about ancient places begins this month.

Leif Isaksen, a member of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group, who is about to commence a Research Fellowship with the Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton, is leading a global consortium, together with Elton Barker of The Open University, to develop a method of integrating data from existing ancient world resources.

He is Co-Investigator on the JISC-funded Pelagios (PELAGIOS: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems) Project which aims to create a common format for referencing ancient locations in online resources over the next nine months.

"The inspiration for this project came largely from our on-going Google Ancient Places (GAP) project which aims to identify classical locations in Google Books and other digital libraries," said Mr Isaksen. "Pelagios will take this a step further by creating a generalised and machine-readable format for referring to ancient places in any Web document whether it’s a text, map or even database."

The project partners are using the Pleiades online gazetteer of over 30,000 ancient locations and will use Linked Open Data principles to connect textual, visual and tabular documents that reference the Ancient World. They will also develop mapping and discovery tools to make it easy for researchers, developers and the general public to make use of the data.

"Although we are developing this standardized method for Antiquity, once it exists, it can also be used just as easily for references to modern place names as well," said Mr. Isaksen.

David Flanders, programme manager at JISC, said: "The Pelagios Project offers the exciting potential to make historical texts more real to students and researchers than ever before: imagine being able generate maps of the stories by Herodotus or even know if the journeys spoken about by Euripides and Sophocles were similar in nature. By adding geospatial data to these classical texts new insights will be added, making data otherwise hidden in the texts explicit and real at a new level of understanding."

The consortium is keen to involve digital librarians and other online resource curators involved in Ancient World research and will host a workshop in March to brief them further. The project will also host an ongoing blog at: http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/

Consortium project partners are: Archaeological Computing Research Group (ACRG), University of Southampton Faculty of Arts & LUCERO, The Open University Pleiades, New York University Perseus, Tufts University Arachne, University of Cologne Supporting Productive Queries for Research (SPQR), King’s College, London Digital Memory Engineering (DME), Austrian Institute of Technology

Image: The Madaba Map (6th C. D) gives an indication of the importance of placenames in ancient cartography. (image source: Wikipedia. (c) Jean Housen).

High-quality video communications capable of supporting flawless video conferencing and home entertainment without goggles could become a reality as a result of research led by Professor Lajos Hanzo.

Professor Hanzo, Head of the Communications Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, and his team are working on systems to support flawless tele-presence with the aid of three-dimensional (3D) ‘Avatar-style’ stereoscopic video and audio communications. The process involves the conception of stereoscopic video systems that can stream footage in real time to a recipient over wireless networks.

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.

“Existing 3D video systems are based on people wearing goggles to view them,â€? said Professor Hanzo. “Our system is expected to become more 'immersive' by dispensing with the inconvenience of wearing goggles." Part of this process involves the conception of stereoscopic video systems that can stream footage in real time to a recipient over wireless networks."

The other radical objective of the 'tele-presence' research at Southampton is to conceive more 'green' wireless systems, requiring less energy than existing systems.

“The first stage is to conceive flawless, immersive video conferencing concepts and then to transfer the design principles to shirt- pocket- sized compact mobile devices, such as camera-phones, within the next decade,â€? said Professor Hanzo.

“At the moment, flawless video conferencing is not widespread, since the quality is not up to scratch. We are working to ensure that video is transmitted without errors and we are developing 'green' techniques to ensure that less energy is used.â€?

The researchers claim that they are the first group to work on the wireless transmission of holographic video.

They will also popularize these techniques within the framework of their Indian and Chinese research consortia conducting research towards the next generation of wireless systems.

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This research is taking place in the world-renowned Communications Research Group in ECS. If you are interested in research in this group you will find more information on our Postgraduate Admssions pages.

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

ECS students Ash Browning and John Isger have produced a new app which provides real-time bus information in the Southampton area.

SotonBus covers all major bus operators in Southampton and provides real-time information on when the next buses are due at a particular bus stop, as well as pinpointing where you are in the city to help you find the nearest stop.

The app was designed last summer when Ash and John were employed as University Interns on the Southampton Learning Environment (SLE) project. They worked under the direction of Professor Hugh Davis and Dr Su White of ECS, who are leading the SLE project, and collaborated with Southampton City Council and Nic Burns of the Southampton ROMANSE traffic project.

“The only requirement for our internship was to produce a real-time bus application for the iPhoneâ€?, said Ash, “but when we started neither of us had iPhones!

“In the future, we’d like to have static ‘offline’ timetables on the application, as well as route planning and a way to display bus routes on a map.â€?

Dr Su White, Senior Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Science, who oversaw the project said: “Our students have again shown their ability to develop a concept to produce an extremely useful tool.

“Increasingly, people need clever technology to help them navigate their complex lives and this application does just that. This app has been developed based on the talents of our students and the application of our research knowledge to improve our local community for the better.â€?

Ash and John are both students on the MEng Computer Science course in ECS; John graduates this summer, and Ash graduates in 2012. The SotonBus app is free to download from the iTunes store, and has already been downloaded over 300 times.