The University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) department has been recognised for its work tackling the problem of gender inequality in science with an Athena SWAN Bronze Award.

The Athena SWAN Charter was set up in 2005 and acknowledges the commitment of the higher education sector to address gender inequalities, tackle the unequal representation of women in science and to improve career progression for female academics.

ECS joins other University departments including Chemistry, Medicine and Ocean and Earth Science to receive the bronze award this year. The University of Southampton has received the Athena SWAN Bronze Award since 2006.

The national achievement recognises the work ECS has done to ensure women are encouraged into an area that historically has been dominated by males.

For the past six years ECS has been committed to promoting diversity across its courses and staff. A Diversity Committee has been set up to encourage a supportive and inclusive environment for work and study. This Committee has already supported a number of activities including diversity training and career coaching for women.

ECS for Women has also been started by students to support women across all levels in from undergraduate to research to academic staff. The group takes an active part in conferences promoting females in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, and organises events focusing on employability improvements such as self confidence building, CV and interview workshops, and networking meetings

Head of ECS Professor Neil White said: “We are delighted to have achieved the Athena SWAN Bronze Award that acknowledges our commitment to address the gender imbalance in science subjects. We have recognised for some time that our fields of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are heavily male-dominated. The lack of women at all levels means we are not benefitting from the talents of the broadest cross-section of society and therefore not achieving our full potential.

“We have already put measures in place to counteract this. We have started being more systematic about ensuring female representation in key decision-making processes, are more comprehensive in our training and mentoring, and encourage a flexible work culture that enables good work life balance. We are also more proactive about encouraging women researchers from ECS and elsewhere to apply for open positions.â€?

Professor Michael Butler, Chair of the ECS Athena SWAN Team, added: "Applying for Athena SWAN was a team effort. We appreciate that this is only the start and we still have a long way to go. We have drawn up a plan of action detailing how we will continue our efforts to tackle this problem, how we aim to play a leading role in equality at University level, and how we can share our experiences with other science and engineering departments at Southampton.�

The Athena SWAN award will be presented at a special ceremony at The Royal Society of Edinburgh, in Scotland, in June.

PROV, a worldwide specification for provenance of information on the Web, has reached a key milestone, with the publication of a standard thanks to the work of an international group led by a University of Southampton professor.

Professor Luc Moreau, from Web and Internet Science in Electronics and Computer Science, is co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provenance working group that has defined a standard for provenance on the Web.

Provenance is information about entities, activities, and people involved in producing a piece of data, which can be used to form assessments about its quality, reliability or trustworthiness.

The PROV standard will provide the structure of a computer-processable audit trail that is capable of describing the origins of information. This audit trail will help people understand where their information has come from and whether it can be trusted.

W3C is an international community that sees organisations, staff and public working together to develop Web standards. It was founded by the inventor of the World Wide Web and University of Southampton Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and aims to lead the Web to its full potential. The group has just published 12 documents to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources.

As part of the progression to Recommendation they catalogued 66 applications, some of which are interesting academic examples, others very practical. One particular application is NASA's use of PROV to provenance-enable the National Climate Assessment, a four-yearly compilation of findings related to climate change. Using this provenance, users will be able to trace the sources of information used in the assessment and therefore make trust decisions.

Professor Moreau says: “The W3C Provenance working group has worked very hard to develop a standard for provenance on the Web. It is important that a standard for provenance is developed because it will help users determine whether they can trust data and documents on the Web. On the Web, where information is mashed up and republished, where we can trust some sources more than others, provenance will allow users to decide whether information is authentic.â€?

For more information about the W3C PROV working group Standard in full go to: http://www.w3.org

A national collaboration of electronic engineers and computer scientists is aiming to develop the next generation of energy-efficient computing systems.

PRiME: Power-efficient, Reliable, Many-core Embedded systems, brings together four world-leading research groups from the Universities of Southampton, Imperial College, Manchester and Newcastle. The five-year £5.6m Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project will undertake creative research into the design and implementation of energy-efficient and dependable embedded systems with many-core processors.

Many-core processing - computer systems with hundreds of microprocessors - has applications in embedded, mobile, general-purpose and high-performance computing, and is widely recognised as the future of computing.

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. and Director of PRiME, says:

“Electronics and software have a tremendous impact on life, from the internet to consumer electronics, healthcare and transportation. Embedded systems, many of which will be low-power mobile devices, will be one of the most powerful tools in tackling global societal challenges.

“Our vision is to enable the sustainability of many-core systems by preventing the uncontrolled increase in energy consumption and unreliability through a step-change in design methods and cross–layer system optimisation.â€?

A key component of PRiME is the close connection and interplay between world-leading research and the involvement of industry to identify and translate technology outcomes from this programme to commercial exploitation quickly and efficiently.

The UK electronics industry is worth £23 billion a year and is the fifth largest in the world. Within embedded systems, the UK is the world-leader thanks to the presence of ARM Ltd and Imagination, both collaborators on this proposal, as well as software and embedded system companies (e.g. Microsoft Research, Freescale and Altera). This research is essential in enabling industrial collaborators to compete in the future many-core market.

Professor Al-Hashimi adds:

“Architectures, software methods and tools, and highly-skilled scientists and engineers that will enable the design of future high-performance many-core embedded systems will be a huge part of future value and wealth creation. To maximise impact, suitable industrial and knowledge-transfer collaborators have been carefully identified that are best placed to influence and exploit the research.â€?

PRiME will also develop the next generation of researchers and leaders by exposing investigators, research fellows and PhD students to a highly stimulating environment, in which research is expected to be both world-leading in terms of academic quality and also have industrial relevance. Research results will be disseminated through high impact publications, workshops, and invited talks at major international conferences.

For more information about PRiME, please visit: www.prime-project.org

People living in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster can find out the radiation level in their area thanks a new tool designed by a team of researchers from the ECS research group Agents, Interaction and Complexity Group (AIC).

The Japan Nuclear Crowd Map (JNCM) intelligently combines crowdsourced nuclear radioactivity data that has been collated since the 2011 emergency when a magnitude nine Tsunami hit the North-East coast of Japan severely damaging the nuclear power plant of Fukushima-Daiichi.

More than 488,000 people were evacuated from their homes when radioactivity in the area increased by up to 1,000 times the normal level. The disaster prompted private individuals to deploy 577 Geiger counters across the country to help monitor the spread of the nuclear cloud. Recently this network was extended to another 1,023 sensors and together they have provided more than 27 million readings since the Fukushima disaster.

The JNCM platform combines all the data collected from these resources into a single database that can help users find out the radioactivity level in their area.

Matteo Venanzi, a PhD student and member of AIC, said: “The platform automatically collects raw radiation data from the online sensors and fuses the data into a single radiation map over Japan. The estimates are then shown to the users as a heat map and an intensity map, showing the average radioactivity in each area.

“Users can also search by postcode to find out the radioactivity in their neighbourhood based on the latest predictions.â€?

JNCM is also available for smartphones as an Android app, allowing the user to find out the radiation level at their current location and to download the radiation heat map directly onto their phone as the data is collected.

Yuki Ikumo, from AIC, who developed the JNCM Android app, said: “JNCM aims to be one of the future technologies for disaster management in which the mass participation of people will play a crucial role in community-based crowdsourcing of environmental monitoring tasks.â€?

The JNCM platform was developed by AIC researchers as part of the ORCHID project, based in ECS, that investigates how human and software agents can work effectively together to collect the best possible information from a disaster environment.

To find out more about the JNCM platform visit http://jncm.ecs.soton.ac.uk or download the JNCM app from Google play.

To find out more about AIC visit www.aic.ecs.soton.ac.uk

To find out more about the ORCHID project visit www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research/projects/765

Our on-going programme to enhance facilities in the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory has recently led to the commissioning of a new climate controlled facility to join our Salt-Fog chamber and Faraday Cage.

The temperature and humidity chamber has been the latest acquisition of the Tony Davies High Voltage Laboratory (TDHVL). A European Union grant, EU FP7 SPABRINK, recently aware will involve using the temperature and humidity chamber.

It has a temperature range of up to 50°C with relative humidity variation from 10% to 80% making it capable of simulating a great majority of climates. Currently it is being used commercially for sample pre-conditioning, thermal resistance tests and safety clothing testing. The working space area of 3.6m2 in combination with the versatile feedthrough panel allows electrical tests to be conducted under strict environmental conditions.

An industrial collaborative work with Wolfson Electrostatic is also planned to test some powder handling equipment (sieves, tubing, tools etc) for safe use in Zone O flammable atmospheres, to the European Standard EN13463-1 (Non-electrical equipment for potentially explosive atmospheres). The test involves artificially generating the maximum surface charge density on the test piece and then quantifying the magnitude of the resultant ESD’s using an electrical test probe. The standard requires testing at controlled temperature and low humidity conditions (23C, 30%RH).

The Environmental\Salt-Fog chamber, which conforms to the latest British standards for wet tests (IEC60060), has also just been refurbished to increase its efficiency and set-up time. It is currently capable of simulating fog and rain with a temperature range of up to 30°C, using voltages up to 80kV at 1Amp and also switching impulse tests of up to 200kV. Over the past decade it has been used extensively for commercial testing of switchgear, bushings and cable terminations.

The Faraday Cage which has been within the lab since its beginning completes the set of large control chambers available at the TDHVL. The working space area of 3.75m2 and its ability to attenuate electro-magnetic noise by approximately 80db has made it ideal for partial discharge research projects as measurement sensitivity is around 200fC. It is also used for highly sensitive measurement experiments such as conductivity measurements of impurities in insulating transformer oils.

There was a great atmosphere at this year’s ECS Alumni Reception, held in London on Tuesday 21 May.

Around 280 alumni attended the event from over 50 years of ECS history, and the lively atmosphere in the IET’s Riverside Room continued throughout the evening and even after the event had officially ended!

‘We were really delighted that so many ECS alumni came along to support the event and to reconnect with fellow students and hear about recent developments in ECS’, said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS. ‘It was great to hear about their success in different fields, and also to have many offers of support for our current students.’

Professor White told the alumni that their support was invaluable to student activities in ECS, enabling student development projects, the establishment of student societies – many of which were represented at the reception by current students, and the creation of new mentoring programmes. Alumni also play a large part in the ECS Careers Hub activity by offering internships and graduate jobs to ECS students, by bringing their companies to the annual Careers Fair, and by taking part in the programme of student careers conferences.

‘One of the great things about ECS that everyone comments on is the strength of the community,’ Professor White said in a short address at the reception. ‘We are very proud of our students and we take great pleasure in the success and influence that our graduates achieve in the world after ECS and the University of Southampton. We are delighted to have your support to help us continue to build the strength of the ECS community in the future.’

See photos of the event on our flickr Photostream.

For further information on ECS alumni events contact Joyce Lewis, ECS Senior Fellow (tel. 023 8059 5453).

Join our LinkedIn Group: 'ECS Alumni, University of Southampton'

A single device designed by ECS engineers could enable us to find out which parts of our homes are the most energy-hungry without installing plug-in power monitors on each individual appliance.

Dr Reuben Wilcock, Senior Enterprise Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and PhD student Robert Rudolf now have the opportunity to take their multi-core current clamp to market as joint winners of this year's Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs Award. The Award was established to identify entrepreneurial researchers in UK universities, working in electro-technology and at an early stage of their careers, and to enable them to commercialise their research. Dr Wilcock and Mr Rudolf will receive the award at the Academy's Awards Dinner in London on 17 July.

There is a huge market for measuring energy use in the home, which is set to increase as we move towards greater use of smart meters. All home energy management systems rely on power measurement, usually by a single core current clamp sensor on the incoming live wire. However, this only gives the user a reading for the total electricity use and does not provide information on which parts of the house use most power. Individual monitors on each appliance can provide this data, but require access to sockets and the appliance to be powered down for fitting and removal.

Dr Wilcock and Mr Rudolf have developed a multi-core clamp sensor that can measure current flowing in any accessible mains cable, giving a more detailed picture of the electricity usage in a home. Through extensive modelling and analysis they have shown that they can calibrate the device and accurately measure mains cable current to a full scale of 16 Amps with an accuracy of better than 1 per cent.

"This is a world first," says Dr Wilcock. "Many people have tried to do this but non-invasive measurement of current in two- or three-core mains cables is extremely challenging because an equal and opposite current flows in the live and neutral wires, cancelling out the field you are trying to measure. Our system addresses this challenge by using state of the art sensors and elegant calibration and measurement algorithms."

The new clamp is also ideal for industrial power monitoring - many industrial machines are permanently wired in and have no plug to accommodate a conventional energy monitor. The system will also be invaluable for office energy audits, reducing the need to turn off equipment for fitting and removal, and for electrical test equipment to help electricians find faults.

"There is a £50billion market for energy management systems in the residential sector alone", says Don Spalinger, Director of Research and Innovation Services at the University of Southampton. "Reuben and Robert's invention has the potential to significantly impact not only the home, but also the office and industrial sectors. The innovation of a non-invasive device to measure the power utilisation of individual equipment will add a whole new approach to the markets, and we see commercialisation of this being done very quickly."

Professor Sir Richard Brook OBE FREng, Chairman of the ERA Foundation, says: "Reducing emissions is a huge challenge and this new sensor promises to advance the accurate monitoring of household energy use. This work is a fine example of the excellent research being done in British universities - as the Academy is currently highlighting through its Engineering for Growth campaign. We are delighted to support Dr Wilcock in developing this innovation further."

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science have released a smartphone app designed to help in the search for a rare cicada found only in the New Forest National Park.

The New Forest Cicada (Cicadetta montana s. str.) is the only cicada native to the UK. During May to July it sings with a very characteristic high-pitched song, which is at the limits of human hearing and is particularly difficult for most adults to hear. Sightings of the cicada within the New Forest date back to 1812, but the last unconfirmed sighting was in 2000. However, it’s quite likely that colonies remain undiscovered in less visited parts of the forest.

The search for the cicada will be launched at the New Forest National Park BioBlitz, which is being organised by the New Forest National Park Authority on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 June 2013. The wildlife monitoring marathon will be held at Roydon Woods Nature Reserve near Brockenhurst. From 4pm on 7 June until 4pm on 8 June, nature lovers can join experts on bug hunts and river surveys, as well as take part in pond dipping, fungi forays and an early morning birdsong walk.

Dr Alex Rogers, a Reader in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, who leads the work of the New Forest Cicada Project says: “Modern smartphones have extremely sensitive microphones and enough computing power to automatically detect and recognise the song of the New Forest cicada.

“We’re hoping that the millions of visitors to the New Forest can use their smartphones to help us locate any remaining colonies of the cicada that might remain in the forest.â€?

The app records a 30 second survey using the smartphone’s microphone and looks for the particular frequencies and sound patterns that characterise the cicada’s song. If it thinks a cicada might have been heard, it prompts the user to upload the recording, so that it can be analysed in more detail.

“The cicada likes sunny south-facing clearings, and will only sing on a warm day when there is little wind, so we’ll be encouraging people to use the app when conditions are best. We’ll be able to use the reports from the app to compile a map of areas that have already been searched, in order to focus the efforts of the professional entomologists who are also looking for the cicadaâ€?, says Davide Zilli, the PhD student who has developed the app.

“We use an approach similar to that used in human speech recognition to detect the cicada’s song. As we collect more recordings from the forest we hope to be able to extend this to automatically recognise many more common insects.â€?

Natalie Fisher, Interpretation Officer at The New Forest National Park Authority, adds: “The New Forest has a unique mix of habitats, which make it one of the best places for wildlife in Britain. We’re very excited by the fact that this app, and the activities going on during the BioBlitz, will draw attention to the rich wildlife that we have right on our doorstepsâ€?.

The app is available for both iPhone and Android smartphones and is available on the iTunes and Google Play app stores by searching for ‘Cicada Hunt’. More information about the cicada and the app can be found on the project’s website – www.newforestcicada.info.

Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has recorded outstanding results in one of the UK’s leading university league tables.

In the Guardian University Guide 2014, published today (Tuesday 4 June), the University of Southampton leads the table for Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and is ranked in the top five for Computer Science and IT.

‘This is another terrific result for ECS,’ said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS. ‘It’s great news for our students and our staff, but also for prospective students who are currently holding offers to come to Southampton to study on our degree programmes later this year. Internationally, our students from outside the UK have confirmation that they will be studying in one of the best places in the world.

‘ECS students can be sure that they will benefit from the highest-quality teaching and facilities, and that when they graduate they will be in demand by the leading high-tech companies in the world,’ he added.

The Guardian has traditionally put a strong emphasis on student-centred issues in the construction of their league table, which continues to be an important factor in student choice, particularly in the international market. One of the areas in which ECS has done particularly well in recent years is in its record for graduate employability, and its range of partnerships with some of the world's leading companies and graduate employers.

Our video - "Why I chose ECS", gives some idea of the opportunities available to students at ECS. "I came here simply to be among the best,’ says MEng Electronic Engineering student Alex Forward. ‘You get taught by the best, you get to learn with the best. It’s a great place – the best in the country.â€?

University of Southampton Open Days this year take place on 5 and 6 July and on 6 and 7 September. ECS will be providing tours of its facilities with the opportunity to speak to current students and staff, and to find out about student project work and our careers and employability activity. Full information is available on our University Open Day booking pages.

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

Meet Erica the Rhino - a six-feet long cyber-rhino, designed and built by ECS staff and students.

Erica is part of Marwell Wildlife’s Go! Rhinos campaign, which will see a spectacular trail of colourful and creative sculptures in the streets and parks of Southampton this summer. Erica has been designed and built by Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) staff and students at the University of Southampton. The state-of-the-art rhino, which has been decorated by Chris Clancy, a student from the University’s Winchester School of Art, can move her ears and eyes, change her mood and even tweet. Using small low-power computers Erica, a fibreglass sculpture, can respond to nearby people and even has her own WiFi network so the public can interact with her via smart phones. Erica is currently being customised with digital features including LED lights to help her blink and adjust to focus on her fans, read QR codes and move her ears. Erica tweets, reads tweets and her various Raspberry Pi computers, created especially for schools and hobbyists, will interact inside just like web servers in the World Wide Web. Erica even has a specialist “brain teamâ€? who have made it possible for her to learn about her environment and provided her with both short and long term memory. The short term memory enables her to react instantly to an action, while the long term memory recalls accumulated actions so that her mood and behaviour can change throughout the day. The people of Southampton will be able to visit Erica in the Marlands Shopping Centre during the summer months and improve her mood by “feedingâ€? or tweeting her or interacting with their phones. Dr Kirk Martinez, who is leading the team, says: “We are really enjoying bringing together lots of cool technology to make our rhino interactive. The team of volunteers building it are specialists in areas like web technology or electronics and are really excited about the project.â€? Kirstie Mathieson, Go! Rhinos Project Manager, says: “We are thrilled to see the transformation of Erica into a truly interactive and unique piece of art and science. The team at ECS have worked so hard and everyone at Marwell Wildlife is so excited to have her as part of the trail.â€?

Go! Rhinos is a mass, world-class public art exhibition brought to the streets and parks of Southampton by Marwell Wildlife. From the 13 July until 22 September, rhino sculptures will trail all over the city, demonstrating the artistic talent that Southampton has to offer. Although Erica is still being digitised you can follow her journey on Twitter, Instagram and through her blog. You can find out more information at www.gorhinos.co.uk and http://www.ericatherhino.org/