Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton, has been named as the second most influential woman in UK IT in a poll published in Computer Weekly.
Dame Wendy joins 24 other women who, according to Computer Weekly, represent role models who have an important role to play in the future diversity and success of the high-tech community.
âI'm delighted and flattered to have been included in such a distinguished list and I applaud Computer Weekly for their efforts to highlight the role of women in IT in the UK which is far more significant than is often realised,â? said Dame Wendy.
âSuch publicity will encourage others to consider careers in an industry that is one of the most exciting and important to be in today,â? she added.
Dame Wendy has held many leadership roles in addition to her academic research in computer science, in the development of the World Wide Web and, more recently, in establishing and developing the new discipline of Web Science.
With Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Dame Wendy co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006. She is currently a Director of the Web Science Trust, which has a global mission to support the development of research, education and thought leadership in Web Science.
Amongst the roles Dame Wendy has held are: President of the British Computer Society; the first non-North American to lead the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest organisation for computer professionals; a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology; Senior Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering; and a member of the Research Council of the European Research Council.
This summer, she has also received honorary degrees from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Queen's University in Belfast, and the University of Birmingham.
Research on drone technology and disaster management led by Professor Nick Jennings and highlighted by the BBC could prove vital in improving the response of emergency services and populations to disaster management.
The technology being developed by Professor Jennings and his research team in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, in association with BAE Systems and other collaborators, forms part of the large-scale ORCHID research project. This project evolved from the successful ALADDIN research collaboration which used agent technology to aid decision-making in decentralized, distributed information systems, such as the aftermath of a disaster.
Professor Jennings talked to the BBC about how the drones (autonomous flying vehicles) will be used: "Humans can do things like fill in maps based on what they see, starting from a blank map, which is exactly what happened in Haiti. What buildings are damaged, where facilities are, that kind of basic crowd-sourcing already happens.
"But we want to augment that with autonomous flying vehicles that are able to get a view of the bigger picture on the ground, to improve situational awareness. They can figure out where the disaster responders should go, where the resources should go."
In Professor Jennings' proposed system, UAVs will be launched immediately to monitor the unfolding disaster from the air. According to the BBC, what makes Prof Jennings's research stand out is that he is interested in allowing drones to fly as squadrons, improvising their own flight paths as a unit in response to new information, without human intervention.
"The underlying research is based on aspects of artificial intelligence, getting software to do clever things, and underpinning that is a form of mathematics", explains Professor Jennings.
The teams of drones that will patrol a disaster have already been tested extensively in Sydney, Australia, and Professor Jennings tells the BBC that a fully operational system will be ready in about 18 months.
Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have devised a novel method for forming virtual power plants to provide renewable energy production in the UK.
The results of their work, which presents a new mechanism for integrating small renewable sources into the Grid, are currently being presented to the prestigious AAAI Conference being held this week in Toronto.
In the last decade, small and distributed energy resources (DERs), such as wind farms and solar panels, have begun to appear in greater numbers in the electricity supply network (Grid).
To ensure that energy demand is met without interruptions, the Grid requires power suppliers to provide an estimate of their production and the confidence in meeting that estimate. Depending on the confidence placed on the estimates, the Grid is able to choose the appropriate number of conventional generators needed to produce and supply energy whenever it is needed - the more accurate the provided estimates, and the higher the confidence placed in those estimates, the better for the Grid scheduling activities.
Although the deployment of DERs could reduce reliance on conventional power plants, their integration into the Grid is problematic, since the DERs, given their small size, are largely âinvisibleâ to the Grid. Even if visible, the uncertainty and uncontrollability of renewable energy sources prevents individual DERs from profitably dealing with the Grid directly, or participating in the wholesale electricity market because they are often unable to meet the set generation targets.
Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are fast emerging as a suitable means of integrating DERs into the Grid. They are formed via the aggregation of a large number of such DERs, enabling them to reach similar size and supply reliability as conventional power plants.
In a new study, ECS researchers promote the formation of such âcooperativeâ VPPs (CVPPs) using intelligent and multi-agent software systems. In particular, they designed a payment mechanism that encourages DERs to join CVPPs with large overall production.
Dr Valentin Robu, from the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group, who worked on the study, says: âThere is considerable talk about how to integrate a large number of small, renewable sources into the grid in a more efficient and cost- effective way, as current feed-in tariffs, that simply reward production, are expensive and ineffective.
âCVPPs that together have a higher total production and, crucially, can average out prediction errors is a promising solution, which does not require expensive additional infrastructure, just intelligent incentives.â?
By using a mathematical technique called proper scoring rules - a measure of the performance of an entity, be it person or machine, which repeatedly makes decisions under uncertainty) - intelligent software agents, representing the individual DERs, are incentivised to report accurate estimates of their electricity production.
The researchers devised a scoring rules-based payment mechanism that incentivises the provision of accurate predictions from the CVPPs - and in turn, the member DERs - which aids in the planning of the supply schedule at the Grid. The mechanism guarantees that DERs are rewarded for providing estimates that are both accurate and have a high confidence, ensuring that software agents are given credit for high probability estimates that are close to the realised ones.
Dr Robu adds: âScoring rules with specific incentive properties have long been used to design payment mechanisms that incentivise agents to report private probabilistic predictions truthfully and to the best of their forecasting abilities.
âWe show that our mechanism incentivises real DERs to form CVPPs, and outperforms the current state of the art payment mechanism developed for this problem.â?
The researchers collected half-hourly wind-speed data for a 10-week period from 16 commercial wind farms in the UK in order to validate their approach. They will be presenting their paper at the AAAI conference (22-26 July), in Toronto, Canada this week.
The Southampton researchers have been exploring these ideas for some time through the iDEaS project, an industrially-funded project, which aims to explore the issues associated with the decentralised control, operation and management of future generation electricity networks. The other members of the research team are Dr Ramachandra Kota and Dr Georgios Chalkiadakis. The project is led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings.
Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, had a special role at the spectacular opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday 27 July.
In the part of the show that paid homage to the UKâs role in industrial innovation, Sir Tim was seen sitting at a computer screen, as the World Wide Web was acknowledged to have brought people together and provided unimagined opportunities for the worldâs communications and creative industries.
Sir Timâs live tweet: âThis is for everyoneâ, appeared around the stadium as members of the audience displayed the words on pixelated light pads.
Sir Tim has held a Chair of Computer Science in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, since 2004. He is 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering at Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the World Wide Web Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and holds the Order of Merit (OM).
It was in 1991, when he was working at CERN in Geneva that 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.
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. The Web Science Trust was launched at Southampton in 2009, and from 2013 it will be possible to study Web Science at Southampton as an undergraduate degree.
Sir Tim and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, also at ECS, and Head of the Web and Internet Science research group, are co-directors of the UK's new Open Data Institute, which aims to ensure that the benefits and potential of open data are shared by the UKâs business community.
Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical and Applied Sciences at the University of Southampton, said: "We're thrilled to see Sir Tim take centre stage during the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympic Games. When he first demonstrated his new ideas in the early 1990s, few could predict that the World Wide Web would become the dominant and universal information system we all use today. At the time, only a few visionaries had it in mind that this new innovation would fundamentally change our lives so much.â?
In the year that the University is celebrating its 60th anniversary it is also the 10th anniversary of the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory.
The Laboratory was renamed in 2002 in honour of Professor Tony Davies who was responsible for its creation. Its work in the area of dielectric materials has been recognised by the University as one of its 60 successes since 1952 and on Saturday 30 June the Lab opened its doors to the public as part of the Universityâs Community Day.
More than 140 visitors witnessed demonstrations of high voltage phenomena and were given tours around the facility.
The HV Lab has expanded over the last 10 years - in 2004 it doubled in size with the addition of a new hall and a dielectric materials laboratory. In 2010, a mezzanine floor was added to the old hall, allowing for further expansion in both research activity and commercial testing. This has led to the creation of a multidisciplinary research team, which is currently addressing a range of complex problems associated with the design of improved dielectric systems, specific issues associated with high voltage plant and its operation in what is an uncertain future.
For more information about our current activities see our HV Lab web pages.
Twenty-seven days after leaving London, a team of recent graduates from the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences made a triumphant entry to Budapest at the end of a marathon cycle ride across Europe.
Three graduates from ECS-Electronics and Computer Science - Tom Dell, Fergus MacGarry, and Will Neep, who all graduated this summer with MEng degrees in Electronic Engineering - were joined by Martin Blick, who graduated with an MPhys degree in Physics and Astronomy. The 1200-mile journey which finished last Saturday (25 August) marked the end of their university degrees in spectacular style, but has also raised over £1300 for Save the Children and the Southampton Hospital Charity.
âBudapedalâ began on 28 July and has taken the team through eight countries and across 1200 miles of Europeâs road network. Throughout the journey the team have blogged about their progress and their adventures along the way, ending with this final post: "We all still canât quite believe we have finished, but it certainly feels good not to be in the bike saddle any more! A massive thank you to everyone who has sponsored us both in the run up and during our adventure! It has been fantastic to watch the total grow as we cycled!"
The team were supported by funding from ECS Alumni through the Student Development Fund.
To donate to the teamâs charities, visit the Budapedal donation website.
The UKâs Software Sustainability Institute is on the lookout for a team of researchers to take part in its new Fellows programme to develop a better understanding of the way that software is used in research.
Each Fellow will be allocated £3,000 over 18 months to support activities that are beneficial to both the Fellow and the Institute such as travelling to conferences, or setting up and running workshops. The Institute has launched the prestigious new programme to recruit outstanding UK-based academics and researchers, who will help them gather intelligence about research and software from a whole range of subject areas.
The Software Sustainability Institute is a team of experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, who are committed to cultivating world-class research through software.
The Institute team is looking for about 15 new Fellows, from PhD students to professors, who are based in a wide range of research areas that rely on software such as science, technology, digital humanities, engineering and social sciences.
The programme follows on from a successful Agents programme run over the past year by the Institute. The pilot programme saw ten Agents recruited to keep the Institute up to date with the latest software developments in their field.
âSoftware is now a fundamental part of research. The Software Sustainability Institute was set up in 2010 to help researchers use and develop software that is reliable, well engineered and can be re-used by different disciplines in and outside their research programmes,â? said Simon Hettrick, the Instituteâs Publicity Manager, who is based in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
âTo achieve this we need to gather information from across as many research areas and software programmes as possible to see what is available, what works well and what could be used elsewhere.
âWe ran the Agents programme last year and had a phenomenal amount of interest from people who wanted to take part in the programme. Over the year our Agents gathered useful intelligence that we are using to inform researchers about more sustainable research software,â? added Simon.
Interested candidates can start applying for a Fellows place immediately and will find it advantageous to attend the official launch event at the Digital Research 2012 conference on 10 September in Oxford. Attending the launch event is free.
The launch event will be a great opportunity for potential applicants to find out more about the Fellows programme, network with like-minded researchers from across all disciplines, meet people from the Institute and discover the important role that better software can play in research.
As well as talks from Instituteâs Director, Neil Chue Hong, Software Architect, Steve Crouch, and Fellows Programme leader, Shoaib Sufi, some of the Agents who took part in the pilot programme will be on hand to share their experiences.
University of Southampton Open Days for prospective students take place this month on Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5 September.
Prospective students are able to visit Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) throughout the two days, with tours and presentations demonstrating the unique opportunities available at the University of Southampton. Visitors will also be able to meet past and current students, visit our undergraduate labs and learn about ECS studentsâ excellent careers prospects.
Open Day presentations will provide introductions to all the subjects taught in ECS - Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informational Technology in Organisations, Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Electromechanical Engineering. Visitors will be able to tour the Nanotechnology cleanrooms, the ECS computer labs and the electronic teaching labs. Careers talks, student showcase events and drop-in sessions will also be running throughout the two days.
The University of Southamptonâs Open Day website provides further information as well as booking opportunities.
"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 at the University of Southampton is currently ranked 1st and 2nd in subject league tables (The Guardian University Guide 2013/The Times University Guide 2013), while Computer Science and IT is currently ranked 3rd and 8th in the same league tables.
Further information about Open Days is available on the University of Southamptonâs Open Day website.
Three ECS Computer Science students â James Brierley, Patrick Naish, and Anton Smyrnov, have spent the summer working in Newbury as Interns with Micro Focus, an internationally leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing and management solutions.
ECS-Electronics and Computer Science encourages all its students to undertake internships during their summer break and there are many opportunities open to them from the large number of companies with which ECS is involved through its career and employability initiatives. Internships provide students with a wide range of experience of different companies and styles of working during their degree programme and help them gain important insights into the workplace.
During their internships the students have had the opportunity to work as part of a project team at Micro Focus and to experience processes new to them which will add to their ability to understand the importance of their coursework. The students reflect here on their experiences:
"The internship at Micro Focus involved working on a web-based IDE currently being maintained and supported by IBM that enables developers to program on the web (http://orion.eclipse.org)" (writes Anton Smyrnov). "Although currently it mainly supports web-based languages and scripts and is still in its initial development stages, our goal was to write a plugin for COBOL (used primarily for business applications) with a goal of integrating into it as many Eclipse-like features as possible.
âOur team was composed of five student interns and two supervisors with everyone being equally engaged in the whole development process. We were following a Scrum approach towards software development which is used across all the teams at Micro Focus. Every week, a new Scrum-master was chosen by the previous one, and he/she was involved in managing the estimations of tasks for the current iteration, making sure that everyone updated their progress on the tasks, and conducting daily Scrum meetings. Since the beginning of the internship, everyone has had a chance to be in this role which enhanced our understanding of agile software development and provided very useful practical experience.
âParticular attention has been paid to rigorous testing, which was somewhat new to some of us, as it involved writing not only JUnit but also GUI tests with Silk. The tests helped us to spot a lot of bugs and we have come to appreciate how important they are for releasing stable feature-complete software.
âApart from work, Micro Focus organized socials for us where we had a chance to meet other interns and recently-employed graduates, as well as to get to know each other better. Also, every intern has had a weekly one-to-one meeting with a supervisor where we could discuss any impressions, thought or concerns of the past week. Micro Focus is definitely a company that cares about their employeesâ feelings and wants them to enjoy their time in the workplace."
Patrick Naish commented: âWe're now in our final week at Micro Focus - it's gone surprisingly quickly. Our presentation went well, despite being to an unexpectedly large crowd (including the CEO). Our project is now pretty much feature-complete, and we're on our last day of bugfixes. The next two days will be spent on "spikes", where we investigate side-projects to the main one. There are some plans to deploy what we've done on the company's own forums - and potential applications as an education tool. Overall it has been a very useful experience, and we really appreciate the organisation and support given by our managers Chris Whitty and Sam Prophet. We'd recommend an internship at Micro Focus for anybody interested in getting experience working in a Scrum process.â?
Richard Levy, Director of Development Operations, commented: âMicro Focus is delighted with the enthusiasm, talent and energy of this yearâs summer Interns which was reflected in the quality and completeness of the solution they produced.
"Interns at Micro Focus work together in single scrum team focused on a specific technical challenge rather than through separate individual placements in our permanent teams. This has proved to be a very productive and rewarding way of working for everyone concerned; providing experience throughout the agile lifecycle and allowing the interns to see their work through to fruition in a completed project. Aside from the obvious technical skill it was rewarding to see strong teamwork, excellent presentation skills and a real desire to deliver a quality solution.
"We have enjoyed hosting this yearâs team and sincerely hope we will work with them all again in the future along with a new intake next summer.â?
The interns are pictured here: (l-r): Chris Whitty, Samantha Prophet (Micro Focus supervisors), Anton Smyrnov (ECS), Ben Morris, Richard Peach (Univ. of Cambridge interns), James Brierley, Patrick Naish (ECS)
The ECS Careers Fair 2013 will take place on Tuesday 12 February, when around 70 of the UKâs leading technology employers will be able to engage with students studying Computer Science, IT in Organisations, Electronics and Electrical Engineering in ECS. Places are still available at the Fair. For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.
ECS Professor Nigel Shadbolt was a member of the Steering Group for the new global Web Index, compiled by the World Wide Web Foundation, and published today at a launch event in London.
The World Wide Web Foundation is led by Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web and also a Professor in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science. The new Index is the worldâs first multi-dimensional measure of the Webâs growth, utility and impact on people and nations. Covering 61 developed and developing countries, it measures how well these different countries around the world are harnessing the benefits of an open and universal Web. This inaugural poll is topped by Sweden, followed by the USA, the UK, Canada and Finland in the top five.
Combining over 80 indicators to evaluate access, affordability, institutional and policy environment, and social and economic utility, the Web Index will now be published on an annual basis, providing an analytical tool for researchers and a resource for policy makers.
"By shining a light on the barriers to Web for everyone, the index is a powerful tool that will empower individuals, government and organisations to improve their societies," Sir Tim tells the BBC. "The Web is a global conversation. Growing suppression of free speech, both online and offline, is possibly the single biggest challenge to the future of the web," he added.
Professor Nigel Shadbolt, who is a member of the Board of the World Wide Web Foundation representing the Web Science Trust, commented: "The Web is essential to modern life. Providing a detailed index of how well countries are doing at providing the empowering and enriching benefits of the Web is a really important development. We hope to refine and extend the reach of the Web Index â but it is clear that it will inform decision making and help people argue the case for doing better. Importantly all of the the data and methods used in the Web Index will be transparently and openly published for others to use."