Will Santa use AI to deliver his presents this Christmas?
Just as for all of us, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have really taken their toll at the North Pole this year. One major hurdle remains: how will Santa deliver his presents this winter?
If the reindeer are also having to self-isolate, then the drones will be most useful this year. Santa may need about a million drones to do this, with some bigger ones transporting the gifts from the North Pole, others bringing them to homes, and even smaller ones taking them down the chimney to living rooms.
Will Santa use AI to deliver his presents this Christmas?
Just as for all of us, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have really taken their toll at the North Pole this year. One major hurdle remains: how will Santa deliver his presents this winter?
Published: 15 December 2020
Southampton is a Centre of Excellence in both cyber security research and education.
First-rate cyber security teaching at the University of Southampton has been recognised with a prestigious Gold Award in a new government programme from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Southampton is one of the first universities in the UK to be named an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE).
The Gold Award complements the University's existing status as a Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research, which it first obtained in 2012.
Professor Sassone, Director of Southampton's Cyber Security Research Centre and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair, says: "Southampton has delivered significant impact in cyber security research and education at regional, national and international levels for many years and this latest recognition by the NCSC only confirms our position as a world-leader in this very important field of study and activity.
"Very few universities in the UK - and around the world - can boast excellence in both cyber security research and education but my colleagues at Southampton, together with our many partners in academia and industry, have proven that we certainly do stand out in addressing the many cyber security threats we experience daily."
Professor Hywel Morgan is partnering with Nuclera to create a robust gene printer.
Bioelectronics expertise from the University of Southampton is supporting the development of a benchtop gene printer in a growing partnership with the UK-based Nuclera biotech company.
The new two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) will embed an Associate in the programme to focus on building up key functionalities, such as the novel sensing functions on the platform.
Having rapid access to highly accurate DNA, and its gene and protein sequences, will enable accelerated scientific discoveries and product development across a range of sectors, including medicine, agrobiotechnology and organism engineering.
Dr Jiahao Huang, co-founder of Nuclera, says: "The desktop instrument we are developing is a major step forward for the local synthesis of genes. Being able to produce genes at the benchtop, with all of the control and time saving it offers, has huge market potential.
"The additional expertise and even closer working relationship afforded by this KTP grant will significantly strengthen a key area of our product development."
Professor Morgan’s expertise in bio-sensors and lab-on-a-chip technologies is supporting investigation of the specific engineering steps required to create the robust gene printer. A critical element is the incorporation of a borderless fluid movement platform to provide optimum process automation.
Professor Morgan says: "It is a great opportunity to work with Nuclera to realise their dream of developing a benchtop instrument that can produce genes on demand. I am very excited by the award of the KTP, and look forward to working with Nuclera and the KTN to deliver this exciting project."
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships aim to help businesses improve their competitiveness and productivity through better use of the knowledge, technology and skills held within the UK knowledge base. This KTP project received financial support from UKRI through Innovate UK.
Jody Chatterjee, Knowledge Transfer Adviser, Knowledge Transfer Network, says: "This is an exciting project with an ambitious and innovative company. Nuclera is looking to transform the industry with its novel technology and the KTP is the perfect programme to help this happen. I am looking forward to working with the team as they deliver their game-changing desktop gene printer."
Dr BooJoong Kang is a Lecturer (Assistant Prof. equivalent) in Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Dr Kang obtained a Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Engineering in 2013 from Hanyang University in Korea, with a thesis about machine learning based Windows malware detection. He was a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, UK, from 2014 to 2021 before he joined the University of Southampton. His research is currently focused on cyber security and AI, including intrusion detection, malware analysis, Cloud & IoT security and CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) security. He is author of more than 40 papers (h-index 15, 944 citations, source Google Scholar), published on international conferences, journals, and books.
Dr Kang investigated the intrusion detection and response system to improve CPS security aginst realistic cyber attack scenarios. This research was carried out as part of the EU FP7 project Smart grid Protection Against cybeR attacKS (SPARKS, 2014-2017, €4.8M). He was also involved in two projects as part of RITICS, the UK’s national Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-physical Systems, Converged APproach towards Resilient Industrial control systems and Cyber Assurance (CAPRICA, 2015-2017, £394K) and Cloud-enabled Operation, Security Monitoring, and forensICs (COSMIC, 2018-2021, £249K).
The Alpha cluster has been installed in the University of Southampton’s high-performance computing facility.
The University of Southampton will remain at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advances through the upgraded processing power of a new high-performance compute cluster in Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).
The Alpha cluster, based in the University's state-of-the-art data centre near Southampton, features 24 NVidia RTX8000 GPUs installed across six cluster nodes.
The new facility complements the existing GPU computing provision of the fifth generation IRIDIS Compute Cluster and ECS teaching laboratories, and is specifically aimed at workloads requiring large amounts of GPU memory or long run times.
The cluster enables researchers to train highly parallel machine learning and AI neural networks, while also providing an invaluable resource for Southampton’s research-led teaching programmes.
Each Alpha GPU contains approximately 5,000 processing cores, combining to 120,000 cores across the whole cluster.
Each GPU card has 48GB of RAM to tackle large training data sets that can be stored on the 20TB of fast storage attached to each node. In addition, each node features 100GB/s NVLink interfaces giving outstanding performance when using multiple GPUs.
Lance Draper, Research Systems Manager in Engineering and Physical Sciences, says: "This equipment has been purchased for the exclusive use of ECS staff and students and allows the School to meet ever increasing teaching and research demands for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems."
The Alpha cluster, whose name is inspired by DeepMind's AlphaZero AI system, is already being used by researchers to simulate the complex processes of the optic nerve.
In recent work with PhD students Daniela Mihai, Ethan Harris and Associate Professor Dr Jonathon Hare, computer scientists used Alpha to train variants of the ResNet50 image classification model on the ImageNet dataset to understand how retinal bottlenecks affect these models.
The latest research will be presented at the Shared Visual Representations in Human & Machine Intelligence workshop at the 2020 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on Saturday 12th December.
Dr Hare, of the Vision, Learning and Control Research Group, says: "The new ECS Alpha cluster allows us to investigate how changes to neural network architectures, hyperparameters and training regimes affects what those networks learn in ways that were not possible for us to do before.
"The large-memory GPUs in the cluster allow us to be much more efficient in our training procedures as a result of increased data throughout, and remove limits on model size. Scientifically this is very important because it allows us to understand errors and draw more concrete conclusions from the models we create."
