Over 200 students will attend Graduation ceremonies on Monday 25 July to receive University of Southampton degrees gained in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.
The students will graduate at two ceremonies to be held in the Turner Sims Concert Hall on Monday 25 July: at 9.30 am for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electromechanical Engineering; and at 12.00 noon for degrees in Computer Science, Software Engineering and Information Technology in Organisations. The ceremonies will be followed at around 10.30 am and 1 pm by Graduation Receptions for graduates and their guests, to be held in the University's Reception Marquee, which is situated in front of the Students' Union.
Professor Neil White, Head of ECS, 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 our international reputation."
The majority of students graduating from ECS have already found jobs, despite the difficult economic conditions. Excellent employability figures for ECS graduates were a contributing factor in the School's outstanding league table results this year (Electronics and Electrical Engineering is ranked 1st and 3nd in the UK in recent league tables (The Guardian and The Times May/June 2010) and Computer Science and IT is ranked 5th and 8th), and with many companies already booking for the ECS Careers Fair on 7 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
Robot trading agents, which already dominate the foreign exchange markets, have now been definitively shown to beat human traders at the same game.
Results presented at a conference last Friday (22 July) showed beyond doubt that computerized trading agents, using the Adaptive Aggressiveness (AA) strategy developed at the University of Southampton in 2008, can beat both human traders and robot traders using any other strategy.
The new results were obtained after a re-run of the well-known IBM experiment (2001) where human traders competed against state-of-the-art computerised trading agents - and lost.
Ten years on, experiments carried out by Marco De Lucas and Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol have shown that AA is now the leading strategy, able to beat both robot traders and humans.
The academics presented their findings last Friday at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011) held in Barcelona.
Dr Krishnan Vytelingum, who designed the AA strategy along with Professor Dave Cliff and Professor Nick Jennings at the University of Southampton in 2008, commented: âRobot traders can analyse far larger datasets than human traders. They crunch the data faster and more efficiently and act on it faster. Robot trading is becoming more and more prominent in financial markets and currently dominates the foreign exchange market with 70 per cent of trade going through robot traders.â?
Professor Jennings, Head of Agents, Interaction and Complexity research in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, commented: âAA was designed initially to outperform other automated trading strategies so it is very pleasing to see that it also outperforms human traders. We are now working on developing this strategy further.â?
____
For further information on this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
The University of Southampton student chapter of the IEEE, which is based in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, has received a regional award (Europe, Middle East and Africa), for its outstanding programme and organization this year.
The Southampton branch, sponsored this year by Roke Manor Research, is one of 12 university branch winners of the âIEEE Regional Exemplary Student Branch Awardâ, and the only one in the UK. The prize recognizes in particular the efforts of the 2010/11 student committee.
James Snowdon, Branch Chairman, PhD student in the Institute of Complex Systems Simulation and an ECS alumnus, said: âOver the year our student branch organized an average of one event a week, ranging from academic and careers talks, from companies such as McLaren, Detica and Imagination Technologies, to workshops and guided tours of research facilities.
âThanks to the enthusiasm and support of ECS students and staff we enjoyed very good attendance and levels of participation throughout the year, and the recently appointed new committee looks set to continue this success in the next academic year.â?
Dr Geoff Merrett of the ECS Electronic and Software Systems group commented: âThis is a great accomplishment for the branch, recognising their excellent efforts over the past year.
âThe branch is run entirely by undergraduate and postgraduate students in ECS, and this achievement highlights the independence, self-motivation and broad skillset of our students.
âBeing part of the branch committee has given the students the opportunity to gain experience in organising events, managing budgets, marketing, outreach and interacting with professionals outside of the University. Their efforts have allowed the whole student body to broaden their knowledge, connect with employers, and to interact with the IEEE - the world's largest professional association for the advancement of technology.â?
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) will pay up to £3,000 a year to researchers who use software in their research, to enable them to attend conferences and report back on developments in their field.
The SSI - comprising the University of Southamptonâs ECS â Electronics and Computer Science, the myGrid team at the University of Manchester and led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh - is funded by the UK research councils to help researchers use and develop software for their research.
As part of an initiative designed to better understand the fields that most need the SSIâs expertise, the Institute is setting up a network of Agents. These Agents (researchers) will receive travelling expenses in return for a short report about the conference attended and views on the topics and software that look most promising in the future.
The benefits are:
⢠Up to £3000 a year to attend conferences and events
⢠Support for software development in the researchersâ fields
⢠Add world-leading researchers to researchersâ professional network
⢠Free attendance at training events for new tools and technologies
⢠Improved knowledge of effective techniques for developing sustainable software
⢠A great addition to researchersâ CVs
âYou donât have to be a professor or a principal investigator,â? said Neil Chue Hong, Director of the SSI. âWe are looking for UK-based researchers with a good knowledge of their field, who are keen to travel and to meet new people, and have experience of national and international collaborations. We are looking for applicants from all disciplines and especially from the fields that have been flagged as strategically important to UK research: the ageing population, environment and climate change, the digital economy, energy and food security.â?
After a three-month trial period, Agents will be recruited for an initial term of one year, which is renewable each year.
The closing date is: 8 August 2011. For further information, please visit www.software.ac.uk/agents or email: Agents@software.ac.uk
The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility for building better software. Working with projects from all disciplines â from nuclear fusion to climate change - the SSI provides the expertise and services needed to improve software and increase its growth and adoption. Further information at www.software.ac.uk.
The first Student Conference on Complexity Science which takes place this week (5-6 August)in Winchester will feature over 80 presentations demonstrating how the discipline is addressing challenges such as global sustainability, energy, climate, finance and technology.
The conference is being organised by PhD students from the University of Southamptonâs Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) and will bring together complexity science students from across the UK and particularly the UKâs three EPSRC Doctoral Training Centres at the Universities of Bristol, Southampton and Warwick.
The students will present their current work during the conference, addressing research problems spanning a broad range of scientific disciplines such as social science and economics, climate and earth science, biomedical and neural systems, ecosystems, biodiversity and sustainability, physical systems and materials science, cell biology, molecular biology and biochemical systems, the web, critical infrastructure and techno-social systems, networks science, evolution, and language.
Lord Robert May, distinguished professor, former president of the Royal Society and chief Government scientist, will deliver a keynote speech on Friday 5 August in which he will present his latest work with the Bank of Englandâs Executive Director for Financial Stability, Andy Haldane, on how techniques pioneered to model complex biological ecosystems can be used to deal with systemic risk in financial âecosystemsâ? in order to avoid financial disasters such as the ones experienced globally over the last half-decade.
The second keynote speaker on Saturday 6 August is Luis Amaral, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University, who is a world authority and pioneer in network science. His research aims to address some of the most pressing challenges facing human societies, including the mitigation of errors in healthcare settings, the characterisation of the conditions fostering innovation and creativity, and the growth limits imposed by sustainability.
The students will address a wide range of subjects. A public engagement study by James Crossley at Manchester Metropolitan University will look at how complexity science can be used to conduct studies of zombie, vampire and werewolf attacks on a population. Other interesting contributions involve using complexity science for mathematical modelling of cell fate regulatory networks by Sonya Ridden, University of Southampton; decoding the statistics of neural networks by Marc Box, University of Bristol, and game theoretic models of crime prevention by Hemant Pasi, University of Warwick.
The conference main themes are:
⢠Core Research in Complexity Science
⢠Physical and Engineered Complexity
⢠Biological and Environmental Complexity
⢠Socio-economic and Socio-technological Complexity.
Professor Seth Bullock, who directs the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) at the University of Southampton, said: âThe UK is investing significant sums in training and supporting the next generation of complexity scientists because they are able to bring a new set of tools to bear on critically important interdisciplinary research challenges, such as those surrounding issues of global sustainability, energy, climate, finance and technology. This conference is the first chance for the UKâs complexity science PhD students to come together as a community and learn from each other.â?
The first annual Student Conference on Complexity Science will be held at the Stripe Theatre, Winchester University, 5-6 August 2011.
For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
Twenty years on from the day that Tim Berners-Lee made the first web page available, it is now 'the single most important thing breaking down barriers around the world', according to Professor Dame Wendy Hall, who will be speaking about the anniversary on BBC Breakfast News tomorrow (Saturday 6 August).
Twenty years on from that day, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the World Wide Web Foundation, Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, but in 1991 he was working at CERN in Geneva when he unveiled the world's first web page. Sir Tim made the Web publicly available - a novel way of sharing documents in a global information space, free of charge for anyone to use.
"I don't think any of us realized the significance at the time,' says Dame Wendy. 'When I saw Tim Berners-Lee demonstrate it in 1991 I saw an interesting system, but not what it was going to do."
Computer Science at Southampton has been closely involved in the development of the Web from the earliest days of its existence, and the Web has formed a major part of its research efforts. ECS-Electronics and Computer Science has been a world-leader in Open Access - the global initiative to have all the world's research freely available on the Web - as the first academic institution in the world to adopt an Open Access mandate (2001). ECS also has been at the forefront of the development of the Semantic Web and more recently of the movement towards linked open data.
In 2004 Sir Tim Berners-Lee was appointed Professor of Computer Science at ECS and in 2006 ECS organized the World Wide Web conference. Later that year the discipline of Web Science was launched as a joint initiative between the University of Southampton and MIT. In 2008 the University of Southampton was awarded the first Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science, an initiative which is training Web scientists of the future, and the Web Science Trust was formed in 2009. It now manages a global network of Web Science Laboratories, WSTNet.
In 2010 Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim were advisors to 'The Virtual Revolution', a four-part series made by the BBC, about how the Web is shaping almost every aspect of our lives. The programme won a BAFTA and Digital Emmy Award.
Since 2009 Sir Tim, Professor James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic University) and Professor Shadbolt (all founder Directors of the Web Science Trust) have been central to the development of open data technology and policy for the UK and US governments. Their work has provided a wealth of public data which, in particular, is being used by the community of entrepreneurial developers to create apps that can empower citizens, helping them understand and negotiate their environment.
Nigel Shadbolt will be appearing on BBC Click tomorrow to talk about the Web and his involvement in open data.
Assessing the impact of the Web over the last 20 years, Dame Wendy tells the BBC: âI had no idea when I saw my first website that this was something that was going to be so big. But retrospectively it was obvious â people love to communicate, but the Web, and all the technologies that have grown up alongside it, have enabled so much more than that. The Web has changed the shape of nations, and enabled the silent majority to have a voice. Itâs now the single most important thing breaking down barriers around the world. In the future when the whole world will be able to join us online, the Web will become the worldâs database, a customized information system that will store our knowledge and answer our questions.â?
For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
News from ECS-ELECTRONICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE at the University of Southampton
Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have developed a mechanism which uses smart computerised agents to control energy storage devices in the home, resulting in energy savings of up to 16 per cent.
In a paper entitled "Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid", which will be delivered at the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) in San Francisco on Thursday (11 August), Dr Thomas Voice describes how he and his colleagues developed a novel decentralised control mechanism to manage micro-storage in the smart grid.
The researchers developed a completely decentralised mechanism which uses agent-based techniques to allow energy suppliers to manage the demand from their consumers, which, in turn, allows them to reduce their wholesale purchasing costs, yielding savings of up to 16 per cent in energy cost for consumers using devices with an average capacity of 10 kWh.
The researchersâ approach involves using a real-time pricing scheme that is broadcast to consumers in advance of each daily period. Computerised agents then buy, sell, and store energy on behalf of the home-owners in order to minimise their net electricity costs. By adjusting the pricing scheme to match the conditions on the wholesale market, the supplier is able to ensure that, as a whole, consumer agents converge to a stable and efficient equilibrium where costs and carbon emissions are minimised.
âIn this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for the decentralised control of widespread micro-storage in the smart grid,â? said Dr Voice. âWe see this as an important step to showing that the adoption of widespread, supplier-managed home energy micro-storage is a practical desirable technology to develop for the benefit of both suppliers and consumers. Using the techniques described in this paper, we can envisage energy suppliers providing new tariffs that will incentivise consumers to buy affordable small scale storage devices. In turn this will allow suppliers to manage aggregate load profiles, improve efficiency and reduce carbon output.â?
This work as carried out as part of the industrially-funded IDEAS project, led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at ECS, University of Southampton.
ECS researchers have developed a new free way to generate music through controlling computers.
"Grab a block and add a base beat, turn a block to speed up the high hat - and we have a new way to generate music through controlling the computer," says Dr Enrico Costanza of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, who is launching his Audio d-touch system tomorrow (Thursday 25 August).
Audio d-touch is based on Dr Costanza's research into tangible user interfaces, or TUIs - providing physical control of the system in the immaterial world of computers. Using a standard computer and web cam and deploying simple computer-vision techniques, physical blocks are tracked on a printed board. The position of the blocks then determines how the computer samples and reproduces sound.
"As more of our world moves into the electronic - vinyl and CDs to mp3s, books to eBooks, we lose the satisfying richness of touching physical objects such as paper and drumsticks," says Dr Costanza.
"Audio d-touch allows people to set up and use tangible interfaces in their own home, office or recording studio, or anywhere else they like," he adds. "This is the first time that anyone has developed a free application like this."
Audio d-touch has been devised for more than the simple pleasure of generating sound in a novel way. Tangible User Interfaces are an alternative to virtual worlds and researchers in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are investigating ways to move away from the purely digital world online and to rediscover the richness of our sense of touch.
Dr Costanza has developed Audio d-touch over several years. "Our aim is to advance the field by gaining insight into how tangible interfaces can be used in the real world," he comments. "We are keen to have more people download Audio d-touch and provide us with feedback that will help improve the system."
To try Audio d-touch, all you need is a regular computer equipped with a web-cam and printer. The user creates physical interactive objects and attaches printed visual markers recognized by the Audio d-touch system. The software platform is open and can be extended for applications beyond music synthesis.
Dr Enrico Costanza is a member of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
_____________________
For further information on this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
An ECS research project has been nominated for the prestigious title of Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year in the annual Times Higher Education Awards.
Synote, devised and developed by a team led by Dr Mike Wald of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, is an open-source Web application which transforms learning for all students, including those with disabilities.
Dr Wald has already won a series of awards for Synote, which makes multimedia resources widely used in teaching â such as video and audio â easier to access, search, manage and exploit. Learners, teachers, and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronized to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.
Synote has also incorporated crowdsourcing to provide a sustainable method of making audio or video recordings accessible to people who find it difficult to understand speech through hearing alone.
Dr Wald comments: âAutomatic captioning of lectures is possible using speech recognition technologies but it results in recognition errors requiring manual correction and this is costly and time-consuming.
â'Crowdsourcing' the corrections of speech recognition transcription errors is a sustainable way of captioning lecture recordings.â?
"I am delighted that Synote has been appreciated and used throughout the world and has won and been nominated for so many awards since the first version was made available in 2008," said Dr Wald.
The Times Higher Education Awards will be announced at a ceremony in London at the Grosvenor House Hotel on 24 November.
The University of Southampton has received two other nominations: for the prestigious title of âUniversity of the Yearâ, recognizing the Universityâs bold and imaginative initiatives such as taking a leading role in curriculum innovation, pioneering the next generation of Internet infrastructure and new multidisciplinary ventures in life science, marine technology and biomedical research; and for 'Outstanding Contribution to Sustainable Development' â for the âUni-Cycleâ project, which enhances the Universityâs commitment to increase recycling and reduce its environmental impact by refurbishing unwanted and donated bikes from around Southampton and putting them back into active use.
Professor Don Nutbeam, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton, says: âThe University of Southampton is exceptionally proud and delighted to have received three nominations. This is a reflection of the outstanding effort and continual dedication of our staff, and the pioneering work going on in Southampton.â?
______
For further information about this story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453
Prospective students and visitors to ECS Open Days on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 September will find excellent endorsement of the quality of ECS courses in the latest National Student Survey (NSS).
The Survey reports each year on student satisfaction with courses across a range of variables. The results are compiled from a survey of final-year students carried out by the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency. Results for ECS-Electronics and Computer Science and all other university courses can be found on the Unistats web site, which also provides information on employability and entry levels to courses.
In the latest survey ECS Computer Science students gave a satisfaction rating of 92% - surpassed in England only by Cambridge, Bristol and West London Universities. The overall satisfaction rating for Electronics and Electrical Engineering students was 86%, which was in the top 20 of UK universities.
Figures for employability of ECS graduates (those in graduate-level jobs six months after graduation) were an outstanding 95% for both Computer Science and Electronics and Electrical Engineering, demonstrating the value that employers place on an ECS degree.
Open Days for prospective students take place this week on Friday and Saturday, 2 & 3 September.
On each of those days ECS-Electronics and Computer Science will be holding a day of tours, presentations, demonstrations and drop-in sessions, highlighting the opportunities available on our degree programmes, and emphasizing the unique character of the School. Visitors will have the chance to see all our undergraduate labs, and to meet past and current students, as well as to find out about our students' excellent career prospects.
Presentations are held in the Turner Sims Building (see map) and begin at 10 am (the Turner Sims is open for registration from 9 am with coffee available); there will then be separate tours and presentations for Computer Science & Software Engineering; Electrical & Electromechanical Engineering; Electronic Engineering; and Information Technology in Organisations. These presentations and tours are repeated at 11 am, 2 pm, and 3 pm.
Between 12 noon and 2 pm we will be holding two drop-in sessions in the Mountbatten Building where visitors can meet staff and students, tour the labs, watch videos of our Careers Fair and student project work, and find out more from ECS Admissions Tutors. Refreshments will be available. There will also be a presentation on 'Robotics in ECS' by Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner (12 noon in Turner Sims), and a Careers Talk by Joyce Lewis, who runs the ECS employability initiative, at 12.30 in Zepler Building (repeated at 1.15).
The University of Southampton Open Day website provides further information and booking.
'Visiting universities is extremely important in enabling students to find the best place for their study,' says ECS Professor Alun Vaughan. 'There are many factors which make a difference to the kind of educational experience that will suit a particular student and we urge prospective students to take advantage of these visit days to find out as much as they can about what we can offer them.'
Electronics and Electrical Engineering is ranked 1st and 3nd in the UK in recent league tables (The Guardian and The Times May/June 2010) and Computer Science and IT is ranked 5th and 8th.