A lecture to be given on campus this week tells the fascinating story behind the most intriguing Jeopardy! challenge so far ....
Earlier this year an IBM computer took part in the well-known US tv quiz show and beat the best contestants of all time.
The next event in the Distinguished Lecture series at the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences goes inside the mind of Watson, the IBM computer.
Watson is a computer system (devised and built by IBM engineers) which is capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level rivalling the best humans at the task. In this lecture Dr Chris Welty, Research Scientist at IBM's T J Watson Research Center in New York, will discuss how Watson works at a high level with examples from the show.
Chris Welty taught Computer Science at Vassar College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before moving to industrial research. His principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the Semantic Web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team.
The Lecture takes place on Thursday 1 December at 5 pm in the Turner Sims Concert Hall on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. No tickets are required and all are welcome. Refreshments are available from 4.30 pm.
For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
ECS Professors Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee have been named as co-directors of a new world-leading Open Data Institute, established by the UK Government to innovate, exploit and research Open Data opportunities.
The new Institute will be based in Shoreditch, the newly designated 'Tech City UK' area of London, where there is a huge concentration of Web 2.0 start-ups, and it will involve business and academic institutions.
The Open Data Institute is intended to help demonstrate the commercial value of public data and the impact of open data policies on the realisation of this value. The Institute will also help develop the capability of UK businesses to exploit open data opportunities, with support from University researchers. It will help the public sector use its own data more effectively and it will engage with developers and the private and public sectors to build supply chains and commercial outlets for public data. The Government is to commit up to £10m over five years to support the Open Data Institute through the Technology Strategy Board - in a match-funded collaboration with industry and academic centres.
Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI, said: âOne of the reasons the Web worked was because people reused each otherâs content in ways never imagined by those who created it. The same will be true of Open Data. The Institute will allow us to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using Open Government Data.â?
Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Public Sector Transparency board member and new director of the ODI said:
âData is the new raw material of the 21st century and the UK is world-leading in the release of Open Government Data. Open Government Data not only increases transparency and accountability but also creates economic and social value. The Institute will help business to realise this value and foster a generation of open data entrepreneurs.â?
The new Institute is one of a number of measures that the Government announced today as part of a larger initiative to boost UK economic growth.
A working robot controlled by a slime mould, and designed and built in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will play a starring role in a major BBC4/Discovery Channel series to be aired from tomorrow (Tuesday 6 December).
Afterlife - The Strange Science of Decay, uses time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.
Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by. But as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.
One aspect of the series shows the sometimes surprising ability of moulds to react to external stimuli. Earlier this year the production team spent a whole day in ECS, filming with Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner and Dr Soichiro Tsuda, who developed the slime-mould robot. Its central innovation is that its movements are controlled by a biochip which encapsulates a plasmodial cell of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. An electronic interface enables the slime-mould cell to be connected to a computer in order to monitor local mechanical oscillations in the cell and it also provides stimulation for the slime-mould through light signals, causing the movement of the robot.
Dr Tsuda told the programme presenter, Dr George McGavin, that his inspiration for the robot had come from Dr Whoâs Daleks! âItâs amazing that something that lives on dead trees can be used to control a machine,â said Dr McGavin.
Physarum polycephalum has been used by Dr Zauner in research projects which have included both research students and undergraduates in ECS over a number of years: Gareth Jones, now a PhD student in ECS, developed the drive system of the robot in his Part III project and ECS Electronics graduate Paul Macey developed the interface to the slime-mould cell in his Part III project.
Klaus-Peter commented âThere was a time when people in hot-air balloons looked at pigeons and realised that there is a radically different solution to the problem of flight. Now we marvel at nature's molecular computers which tell us that there are radically different solutions to the problem of information processing.
âTo harvest the potential of molecular computing, however, we need a generation of engineers with a broad concept of computation - I am therefore particularly pleased that the most important component of this robot was developed by an undergraduate, Paul Macey.â?
Physarum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood.
âAfterlifeâ will be shown on 6, 7, and 9 December. It will examine many different aspects of decomposition and decay, including the complexity of organisms that are associated with decomposition, as well as exploring our attitudes to bacteria and the breakdown of bio-systems.
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For more information on this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453
If you are interested in PhD research in this area, you can find out more information on our Postgraduate Admissions pages.
An energy quiz which tests people's knowledge of the amount of energy used by devices and processes, such as lights on the Christmas tree, has been developed by researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton.
A team led by Dr Alex Rogers of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group developed The Energy Quiz for BT. The "game with a purpose" is intended to challenge BT employees to test their knowledge about energy.
The online quiz invites players to compete by answering 12 questions about energy comparisons. For example, it asks: which uses more energy - a Christmas tree with 100 lights continuously lit over the festive period or a dishwasher used once a week for month; or it compares heating water for a typical office for a year with a full Boeing 747 flying 400 miles; or heating a typical office for a day versus driving a car 100 miles.
BT has invited 200 employees to play the game and will roll it out to a further 3,500 in the next phase. âFor us this is a way of conserving energy and we are finding that there is a deficiency of knowledge about energy among our employees,â? said Simon Thompson, BT Chief Researcher. âWe have also found that this kind of knowledge is often dull for people and they are not too interested in the statistics, so if we can encourage them to play a game around energy, it makes it more fun.â?
According to Dr Rogers, The Energy Quiz can be tailored to specific work or home environments. With the release of an updated version worldwide this week, he plans to analyse the data to explore peopleâs misconceptions about energy.
âOur informal results so far show that people have a lot less intuition about energy than you would think,â? he said. âPeople think that home consumption is always higher than driving their car to work and they often assume that appliances in the foreground that make a lot of noise or generate heat use more energy over the course of a year than something hidden away in the background.â?
The Energy Quiz is one of a whole host of tools to monitor energy being developed at ECS. Dr Rogers and his team have also developed a range of tools to visualise the real-time carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid and they have developed tools for building energy monitoring. They are also developing computerised agents that can negotiate the charging of electric-powered cars in the most efficient way.
Researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton have launched new software which allows organisations to develop evacuation plans using a combination of crowdsourcing and computer simulations.
Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn and a team of researchers in the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group have devised CollabMap and are now inviting organizations to volunteer information about connections to buildings and roads in their area, so that an evacuation plan can be created for them.
"CollabMap will be of interest to any organization that wants to develop an evacuation plan," said Dr Ramchurn. "We don't just use the information to build a map; we build a computer simulation that shows how people move around an area. Once people log in and draw routes, we aggregate the data to produce a high fidelity map over which we can simulate the movement of thousands of individuals across roads and open spaces, using parallel programming techniques."
CollabMap follows on from crowdsourcing and computer simulation work undertaken by Dr Ramchurn for Hampshire County Council with funding from EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the ORCHID project. ORCHID focuses on capitalising on human/computer interactions in disaster response scenarios.
One of the areas that will be mapped using CollabMap is the Fawley Oil Depot, near Southampton, which is the second biggest oil depot in the world and an area of high risk. Members of the public can take part in the CollabMap exercise, whether they know the area or not. Dr Ramchurn explains how it works on the CollabMap video on YouTube.
The Fawley mapping exercise will run for two months. Similar exercises can be run in any part of the world and can be used by organisations interested in their data being used for evacuation simulations.
The researchers involved in CollabMap are: Dr Ruben Stranders, Dr Trung Dong Huynh, and Dr Bing Shi.
For further information about this news story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453
Prestigious prizes for Best Open-Source Software were awarded to ECS researchers Dr Jonathon Hare and Dr Sina Samangooei at the ACM Multimedia 2011 conference, held this month in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Dr Hare and Dr Samangooei, of the Web and Internet Science research group in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, presented two open-source packages in the competition, both of which were developed in the University. OpenIMAJ and Image Terrier beat the other 26 entries, and Dr Samangooei was awarded the Social Media Award for his enthusiastic use of Twitter throughout the Conference event!
OpenIMAJ is a general-purpose multimedia content analysis library written in the Java programming language. It is the result of a number of past and present research projects within ECS and contains state-of-the-art analysis algorithms and techniques developed by the Southampton team.
ImageTerrier is a scalable content-based image retrieval system, built on top of the Terrier text retrieval testbed, developed by the University of Glasgow. It is possible, using OpenIMAJ and ImageTerrier, to create retrieval systems akin to Google Goggles.
The current development of the software is funded by the European Union under the FP7 projects LivingKnowledge and ARCOMEM, together with the LiveMemories project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trentino.
This work has been supervised over recent years by Professor Paul Lewis and Dr Kirk Martinez of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.
ECS student Adam Malpass was invited to London last week to represent the brightest talent among the UK's electronics students.
Adam, who is in the final year of his MEng degree in Electronic Engineering at Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, met the UK's Business Minister Mark Prisk at the Electronics Showcase event held at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
The two-week event showcased the best of British manufacturing in innovative, high-tech electronics, to highlight the expertise Britain has in this sector, and the contribution that electronics makes to the economy.
Adam was last month awarded the title of 'Scholar of the Year' by the UK Electronics Skills Foundation which promotes Electronics as a discipline in schools and universities and aims to provide a good supply of electronics skills for the sector in the future.
Business Minister Mark Prisk said:
âElectronics is involved in every part of the economy, from consumer goods to farming. It makes cars more reliable, aircraft safer and data movement faster.
âThere is massive potential for growth in the sector and the UK is uniquely placed in Europe to take full advantage of that. We have 40% of the European market in electronics system design, nearly a third of Europe's silicon design companies and we are the home to Europe's largest concentration of electronics systems design houses.
âWith all this expertise already here in Britain, itâs surprising that the public donât necessarily know about it. Thatâs why weâre running programmes like our Make it in Great Britain campaign to dispel the myth that we donât make anything in Britain anymore and inspire our young people to consider an exciting career in modern manufacturing.â?
Click the individual images above to view the year's top ECS stories.
As 2011 draws to a close we look back on a year which saw a series of prestigious awards, research success and high-profile events in ECS.
January
The year began with a visit to the Mountbatten Building from The Rt Hon David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science. Before touring the Southampton Nanofabrication Centre cleanrooms, and the photonics labs of the Optoelectronics Research Centre, the Minister declared the Building open and paid tribute to âthe spirit of Southamptonâ in creating such an impressive facility.
February
The Nano research group announced that a research team led by Dr Zakaria Moktadir had developed a new transistor made from graphene â the worldâs thinnest material. 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," he said. 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.
March
ECS student Andrew Cowan was named Young Engineer of the Year at the British Science Association's 'Big Bang Fair', held in London to mark the start of National Science and Engineering Week. Andrew received the accolade for his Search and Rescue Robot built during his A level Systems and Control coursework at Sutton Grammar School. ECS hosted a number of events as part as part of the Universityâs contribution to National Science and Engineering Week, including the popular Murder Mystery Event and the Technology Zone in the Activity Area.
April
The final event of the Student Robotics Challenge was hotly contested by teams from around the country and as far afield as Grenoble. They had all drawn on huge amounts of ingenuity in designing robots able to undertake the testing circuit of the arena. Now in its fifth year, the Challenge brings together school teams which have all been mentored by a member of the Students Robotics team, which is drawn from current and former engineering students of the University of Southampton, University of Bristol and Imperial College London and is based at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science.
May
The first miniature sensors designed to measure saltiness and temperature across the worldâs oceans were deployed in an ambitious rowing expedition from Australia to Mauritius. The expedition provided the opportunity to measure ocean conditions and provide valuable information about climate change. The sensors were designed by Professor Hywel Morgan of ECS and Dr Mat Mowlem of the National Oceanography Centre Southampton. The ECS researchers were able to test the sensors and to assess their application in areas such as ocean meteorology and water quality monitoring, and as fish tags. The longer-term plan is to commercialise the sensors.
June
ECS played an important part in World IPv6Day when the world's major content providers including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, CNN and the BBC offered their content and services for 24 hours over the new IPv6 Internet Protocol. ECS has been contributing to the development of IPv6 for many years, and runs IPv6 throughout its own network, so was able to participate fully and help validate the new technology by encouraging its staff and students to use Facebook, YouTube, the BBC and other sites available via IPv6 on the day. "We shipped over 100GB of IPv6 traffic on 8 June, which was significantly more than we've ever done before, without any reports of connectivity problems for our users," said Dr Tim Chown, who has led ECS's IPv6 research and deployment work since the late 1990's. "It's been a fantastic day for the future of the Internet."
July
New imaging technology developed by computer scientists and archaeologists at the University of Southampton in conjunction with academics at the University of Oxford was demonstrated at the British Museum. Dr Kirk Martinez of ECS and the team have developed two Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) systems to capture images of documentary texts and archaeological material. The RTI technology systems developed by the project will allow researchers to study documentary and other artefacts remotely in great detail without being restricted by fixed lighting angles. The result will be to ensure that high-quality digital versions of these materials can be consulted by scholars worldwide.
August
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 spoke about the anniversary on BBC Breakfast News (Saturday 6 August). "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. 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."
September
University Open Days saw hundreds of prospective students and parents visit ECS for tours and presentations about the ECS degree programmes and results of the National Student Survey provided excellent endorsement of our courses from recent graduates. Figures for employability of ECS students continued to be particularly strong with both Electronics and Computer Science graduates achieving employment rates of 95% after graduation. This year Electronics and Electrical Engineering was 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.
October
Professor Dame Wendy Hall received an âInternet and Society Awardâ from the Oxford Internet Institute as part of its tenth anniversary celebrations. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has become a major centre for the study of the dramatic societal implications of the Internet. Professor Hall received her award as being one of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research into Web Science. She was a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (now Web Science Trust), alongside Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.
November
Adam Malpass, final-year student in Electronic Engineering at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, was awarded the first annual Scholar of the Year award by the United Kingdom Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF). The other finalist in the award was another ECS student Tom Dell. UKESF was founded in 2010 by collaboration of public bodies, private companies and UK universities to address the threat of a diminishing skills base in the UK electronics sector. Its principal aims are to increase and sustain the supply of industry ready graduate engineers and boost career take up in the industry, worth £23 billion per year to the UK economy.
December
The Governmentâs White Paper on Research and Innovation included the announcement of a new Open Data Institute, to be led by Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS, both members of the Public Transparency Board. The new £10M Institute will be based at Shoreditch, the location of âSilicon Roundaboutâ and will work with business and the public sector to use data more effectively. âData is the new raw material of the 21st century and the UK is world-leading in the release of Open Government Data", said Professor Nigel Shadbolt." Open Government Data not only increases transparency and accountability but also creates economic and social value. The Institute will help business to realise this value and foster a generation of open data entrepreneurs."
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All our news stories from 2011 can be viewed in our News Archive and further information about any news stories in ECS can be obtained from Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453
ILLUSTRATION:hide
The shortage of girls studying computer science is worse than ever before, says Professor Dame Wendy Hall, speaking in The Guardian today.
Despite huge efforts by the scientific community to address the issue over many years, Professor Hall told The Guardian that girls still perceive computing to be âfor geeksâ?, and that this has proved a âculturalâ? obstacle, impossible to overcome.
One of the worldâs leading computer scientists, Professor Hall has also played a prominent role in shaping science and technology policy across the globe, and the issue of female participation in computer science has been high on her agenda throughout her career. She was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton from 2002 to 2007, and is currently Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton.
In The Guardian article Professor Hall calls for computer science to be âgiven a buzzâ? to all pupils in primary schools, with the curriculum being reformed at secondary level. âGirls have been further put off by dumbing down computing to IT literacy,â? she says. âThey think that if they study computing they are going to become secretaries.â?
Official figures show that in 2004 women made up 19 per cent of all students in undergraduate computer science degrees in the UK; by 2009, the figure had fallen to 16 per cent.
âWomen and girls use technology as much if not more than boys and men do and itâs important that women are part of creating the future of this industry,â? says Professor Hall.
The teaching of computer science in schools was also criticized by Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google at his MacTaggart Lecture during the Edinburgh Festival last year.
The careers prospects for computer science graduates from highly-rated courses (such as those offered in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton) continue to be excellent. ECS has one of the highest employment rates in the UK for its graduates, and the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences Careers Fair, on 7 February 2012, will be bigger than ever before, with 65 companies offering graduate roles and internships.
Professor D W Barron, who died in Southampton on 2 January 2012, was the first Professor of Computation in the University of Southampton, and the Foundation Professor of Computer Science.
David Barron began his academic career in Cambridge, where his initial research in the Cavendish Laboratory involved some of the earliest work in computer applications. In the early 1960s he worked with Ferranti on the Titan project, and led Cambridge efforts to develop the Titan Supervisor (a multi-programming operating system) and the Combined Programming Language (CPL). CPL broke new ground in language design and application generality, and led eventually to B and then C â one of the most widely used programming languages of all time.
Professor Barron joined Southamptonâs Mathematics Department in 1967 as the first Professor of Computation, and he combined this for a number of years with the Directorship of the Universityâs Computing Services department. In 1986, having written many of the key texts which helped shape the then-emerging subject of Computer Science, he was appointed the first Professor of Computer Science in the University, marking the establishment of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. He was Head of ECS from 1989 to 1994.
Professor Barronâs many books include influential texts on Recursive Programming, Assemblers and Loaders, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Pascal Implementation, Text Processing and Typesetting, and Scripting Languages. He was one of the founding editors of âSoftware â Practice and Experienceâ and edited the journal for over 30 years from 1971. He also undertook pioneering work on radio wave propagation with Professor Henry Rishbeth, providing understanding of how radio waves were reflected at the ionospheric boundary.
His inaugural lecture, given 40 years ago in the University of Southampton, was entitled âThe Computer, the University, and Societyâ, and extolled the benefits of computer programming as a discipline, in a way that has been echoed recently by governments and industry leaders (it also demonstrated his waspish sense of humour: â[C]omputer programming has all the educational benefits that were ever claimed for the study of Latin, and it is likely to come in useful, too.â?
He concluded his lecture with a rousing and far-sighted statement of his belief in his subject which also provided a strong insight into his relish for his position as a university researcher and teacher:
âIf computers are to be used for good, then it is essential that everyone should understand what they are, and what they can do. Equally, those of us who are behind this technological revolution must gain a greater understanding of our tools, because out of understanding comes judgement. We are only witnessing the beginning of the changes in Society that the wide-scale use of computers will bring. The changes are not going to be comfortable, but it is the job of those of us in the University to ensure, by education and research, that they are not catastrophic. That is why I am in the game. And, to be honest, it is great fun, too.â?
Professor Dame Wendy Hall has described David Barron as âone of the founding fathers of computer science as an academic disciplineâ?, attributing to him the strong foundations of Computer Science at Southampton which enabled the consequent development of ECS.
Professor Barronâs funeral is at Southampton Crematorium at 14:45 on Friday 20 January. All friends and colleagues are welcome to attend.
Memories and tributes to David can be left on our webpage: David Barron: In Memory and Celebration.