Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will be showcasing their Cicada Hunt app on the national stage next week.
The team are taking their smartphone app to the British Science Festival, in Newcastle, and the BBC Summer of Wildlife event, at Sutton Park, Birmingham.
The app was developed by ECS researchers was released in June to help search for the rare New Forest cicada (Cicadetta montana) that is the only cicada native to the UK.
Each year during May to July it sings with a very characteristic high-pitched song that is at the limits of human hearing and is particularly difficult for most adults to hear. Sightings of cicada in the New Forest date back to 1812, but it hasnât been spotted or heard from in more than a decade.
Visitors to the new Forest can download the app that turns their mobile into a portable cicada detector to scour the area in search of the elusive creatures. If a potential cicada song is detected the app prompts the user to upload the recording so that it can be analysed in more detail.
Professor Alex Rogers, of the Agents, interaction and Complexity Research Group, leads the project. He said: âWe will be demonstrating our app to visitors to these two prestigious shows.
âSince June we have had more than 1,500 downloads of the app and about 4,000 reports from the New Forest. Unfortunately we didnât detect any cicadas. The cicada season has finished now but there's a good chance that the warm weather this year will make next year an even better opportunity to search.
âWe think it is quite likely that colonies of the cicada remain undiscovered among the less visited parts of the forest. Weâre hoping that the millions of visitors to the New Forest can help us discover any of these colonies.â?
ECS PhD student Davide Zilli who developed the app added: âThe cicada likes sunny south-facing clearings and will only sing on a warm day when there is little wind. We will encourage people to use the app when the conditions are best. We are also using the reports from the app to compile a map of the area that have already been searched in order to focus the efforts of the professional entomologists who are also looking for the cicada.â?
A group of ECS students have launched an innovative online company which offers outstanding opportunities for designers, trend-setters and discriminating consumers.
Garmsby, which has the slogan "designed by you. chosen by the crowd. worn by everyone.", enables aspiring or established designers to submit a t-shirt design to its website, and then uses crowd-sourcing to enable potential consumers to vote on their favourite designs. The most popular designs are then offered for purchase on t-shirts and, hopefully in the future, on other types of garments.
The company is the brainchild of ECS students Adam Adeniran, Marc de Vos, and Jonny Morrice, who had the idea in a Southampton coffee-shop and have been working for the last six months with ECS Business Strategy Advisor to Students, Jason McMahon, to hone the concept.
The site has launched with 10 submitted designs and a two-week voting cycle. The majority of the profits go to the original designer, providing a platform that will help aspiring designers in building their own clothing brands and establishing their careers. But the site is open to anyone who has a design that they would like to see printed on a t-shirt.
The Garmsby team told the Soton Tab: "We are always looking for people to submit more designs - and they can make money if their designs get the most 'likes'."
The team spent the summer preparing for their launch on 2 September and are now hoping that the idea will be supported across the University and beyond.
In Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) our commitment to tackling the problem of gender inequality in science has been strongly maintained since we were awarded the Athena SWAN Bronze.
The Award recognises commitment in the higher education sector to addressing gender inequalities, tackling the unequal representation of women in science and improving career progression for female academics.
The national award reflects the work ECS has done to encourage women into an area that has historically been dominated by males.
In recent years ECS has promoted diversity across its courses and staff, and has set up a Diversity Committee to encourage a supportive and inclusive environment for work and study.
ECS Women was started by students to support women across all levels from undergraduates to researchers. The group takes an active part in conferences promoting females in science and organises events to improve graduatesâ employability.
âSince we received the Bronze Award we have been working on ways in which we can further encourage women into the areas of Electronics and Computer Science,â? said Professor Michael Butler, Chair of the ECS Athena SWAN Team.
âWe appreciate that gaining the Award was only the start and we still have a long way to go. We have already started working on many of the action points we identified to continue our efforts in tackling this problem. We are also working with our colleagues across the University to share our experiences and work together to encourage more women into science.â?
Among the key areas ECS has been focusing on since winning the Award are:
⢠encouraging more female students without standard A-Levels to enter our Foundation programme
⢠encouraging more females to enrol on courses
⢠expanding our outreach activities to encourage more girls to consider Electronics and Computer Science in higher education
⢠increasing recruitment of female academic staff
⢠gaining a better understanding of why many female postgraduates are not applying for research posts and why many Research Fellows are not applying for academic positions
⢠supporting flexible working and family-friendly policies such as career breaks, parental leave and flexible working
⢠supporting career development for women
⢠providing diversity training for all staff
Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Social Sciences, Management and the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) is launching its pioneering first free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) today (September 18th) on Web Science.
The course is a free online study programme that will give people the opportunity to get a taste of Web Science â an innovative, multi-disciplinary area of research that explores the technical and social sides of the Web.
The MOOC is run in partnership with FutureLearn â part of the Open University â and students will explore topics such as what is web science, security and cyber crime, the digital economy and networks.
The University of Southampton is a world leader in Web Science. It offers the subject at undergraduate, postgraduate and research level; is home to the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre; and has created the Web and Internet Science Research Group (WAIS) that is carrying out research to better understand the origin, evolution and growth of the Web and how it is transforming society.
Many of ECSâs academics were involved in developing the Web including Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt. All are still very influential and key players in the continued research and development of the Web and Web Science.
This new MOOC is just one of a number being launched by the University in partnership with FutureLearn- part of the Open University. They are designed to be studied online anywhere in the world by large numbers of people. As well as traditional course materials including online video lectures, reading material, coursework and tests, MOOCs also provide interactive forums that help students and tutors build an online community.
No prior knowledge of the subject is required, but students should have enthusiasm, a willingness to learn more and develop their skills, and be able to study for two to three hours a week. They can either complete the whole programme or dip into particular topics of interest as and when time allows.
For his two decades of contributions to Open Access, Stevan Harnad, Professor of Computer Science in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liège in Belgium on Wednesday 25 September.
In 1994, the year he came to the University of Southampton, Stevan Harnad launched his "Subversive Proposal", which helped lead to what eventually became the worldwide Open Access (OA) movement. The proposal was that all scholars and scientists should post their peer-reviewed articles free for all online. The proposal was only heeded by a minority even within his own field of cognitive sciences, and even after he commissioned an ECS graduate student in 1997 to create CogPrints, an OA repository for cognitive science papers from all over the world, hosted by Southampton.
So in 1999 Stevan commissioned an ECS postgraduate student to convert CogPrints into free, open source generic software -- EPrints -- with which every university could create its own repository in which it could make its own research output OA. EPrints has since been adopted and emulated worldwide, but the repositories (all registered in the Registry of Open Access Repositories [ROAR] (created and hosted by Southampton) still remained largely empty of their intended OA contents.
In 2001, based on the finding of Lawrence reported in Nature, that computer science articles that were made freely accessible online were cited much more than those that were not, Stevan launched a series of studies (as part of the JISC-funded Open Journals and Open Citation Linking projects in ECS) that tested and demonstrated that the same OA citation advantage occurs in all disciplines. But even the prospect of enhanced citation impact was still not enough to induce more than a minority of researchers worldwide to self-archive their articles, so in 2003, the Head of ECS, Wendy Hall, adopted the world's first OA self-archiving mandate, requiring that all ECS article output be self-archived in the ECS OA repository.
And it worked: Since then almost 100% of ECS research output is OA (and enjoying the citation advantage). But what about the rest of the world -- or even the rest of the University of Southampton? (The worldâs first university-wide OA self-archiving mandate was adopted by Queensland University of Technology in Australia, also in 2003, and Europeâs first was adopted by the University of Minho in Portugal, in 2004).
In 2004 the Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology called for evidence on OA. The Committeeâs resulting recommendation was that all UK universities and funding councils should mandate OA self-archiving, just as ECS had urged and done. In the ensuing years OA self-archiving mandates were adopted by additional UK universities (including Southampton)as well as all the RCUK funding councils, all registered in the Registry of Open Access Repository Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP), created and hosted by Southampton.
But both worldwide and in the UK, the adoption was still only by a minority, and most of the mandates were too weak, being intimidated by publisher embargoes on OA. So Stevan designed a new mandate that would be immune to publisher embargoes and could be adopted by all universities and funders, by separating the date of the deposit itself, which has to be immediate, from the date of setting access to the deposit as OA, which may be delayed if the author wishes to comply with a publisher embargo. In 2006 Stevan again commissioned the design of an eprint-request Button for repositories that allows users to request, and authors to provide, a free eprint of any deposited article for research purposes with one click each. This "Almost OA" Button not only tides over research access needs during any embargo, but it provides a mandate model that can be adopted by all universities and funders, irrespective of publisher embargoes.
The other component in this strengthened OA mandate was to stipulate immediate-deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review, research assessment or research funding.
In 2006, the University of Liege became the first university to adopt this mandate model (coupled with a complementary mandate by the Belgian funding council, FNRS in 2011) and this mandate model proved extremely effective, generating deposit rates of over 85%, sustained now for over half a decade.
But while Stevan was promoting adoption or upgrading to this optimal mandate worldwide, the UK's Finch Committee in 2012 -- under the influence of the publishing lobby -- suddenly recommended a U-Turn in UK OA policy, away from requiring self-archiving (âGreen OAâ?) toward instead publishing in journals that make their own articles OA (âGold OAâ?) -- for a substantial fee. And that fee would have to be paid to publishers (out of already scarce UK research funds) over and above what the UK is already paying publishers for subscription access, using the UK's already scarce research funds, and abrogating authorsâ free choice of journal.
RCUK adopted the Finch model mandate, despite outrage in all sectors (except publishers) in the UK, and no uptake outside the UK. This would effectively have made the UK lose the worldwide leadership in OA that it has exerted since 2003, but fortunately HEFCE came to the rescue in 2013, recommending the adoption of the immediate-deposit mandate for REF2020; and only a few weeks ago a BIS Select Committee also strongly seconded the immediate-deposit mandate while strongly recommending that the 2012 Finch/RCUK policy be upgraded to this mandate. If the RCUK does as Liege and Belgium have done, then the rest of the world is very likely to follow suit, and global OA will not be far behind.
It is for his role in this two-decade sequence of events that the University of Liege is awarding Stevan an honorary doctorate next week.
The UKâs slow progress in preparing for IPv6, the new internet addressing protocol, could threaten UK-based organisationsâ ability to compete on the international stage, particularly in vital fast-growing economies, according to IT provider Logicalis and the University of Southampton.
Furthermore it puts at risk strategies in mobility and emerging trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The UK currently stands in 16th place in Europe and 27th worldwide in an IPv6 readiness league table compiled by Logicalis based on data gathered by Cisco Systems.
âIPv6 might sound like a techy issue," said Mike Cummins, Technical Services Director at Logicalis, "but failure to keep pace with other nations could ultimately have serious implications for competitiveness. Strategies such as the Internet of Things that are impacting the fundamental nature of how companies operate, are at risk of failure if management do not begin to address the changeover to IPv6.â?
Designed to replace the IPv4 protocol already depleted in much of the world, IPv6 will allow the creation of a practically infinite number of public Internet addresses and the internet-enablement of a wide range of products and services such as mobile devices, internet connectivity in devices like cars, residential sensors and heart rate monitors, transportation systems, integrated telephony services, sensor networks, distributed computing, and online gaming. IPv6-readiness is also a requirement for companies looking to tap into growth opportunities in fast growing economies where IPv4 has already run out.
The University of Southampton was an early IPv6 adopter and a founding member of the IPv6 Forum. Dr Tim Chown, lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, says: âAs a university with a strong reputation for computer science it's incredibly important that we provide a leading-edge research and teaching environment. We have been proactive in IPv6 R&D and running IPv6 in production across thousands of systems within our Computer Science department for several years, making many of those services publicly available. We welcome the IPv6 'wake up' message from Logicalis for the UK, and the opportunity to work with them as our IT services partner to roll out IPv6 more widely across our own campus.
âWe share Logicalis' view that IPv6 deployment is critical for future Internet innovation and growth. We would thus recommend that organisations survey their systems for IPv6 capability, contact their ISPs to determine their IPv6 readiness, and build IPv6 requirements into all procurements to ease future IPv6 deployment. Furthermore, with almost all common devices supporting IPv6, and invariably having it enabled by default, organisations should also consider and manage the security implications of IPv6, even where their networks are ostensibly IPv4-only.â?
Staff and students gathered today for a reception to celebrate the contribution to the University of Southampton and to Electronics and Computer Science of Dr Ken Thomas, who is retiring after 36 years as a member of the Universityâs academic staff.
Ken recalled his first day in the University in 1977 when he arrived from Oxford University to teach in the Department of Mathematics. Among the people he met that day was Wendy Hall, at that time a PhD student in Mathematics, who later moved with Ken to the newly formed Department of Electronics and Computer Science in 1986. Ken recalled those early days of computing and the contrast with the huge power and availability of computer services today. During his time in ECS Ken has taught many generations of students, as well as members of the academic and professorial staff in ECS. After retirement, Ken will continue his renowned teaching of Databases!
Professor Michael Butler, Head of the Electronic and Software Systems research group in ECS, paid tribute to Kenâs long service to ECS and to his other roles in the University, including dedicated service as University Marshal at Graduation ceremonies. Staff from ECS were joined at the reception by members of the Mathematics department, ISVR, the ORC and Engineering and the Environment.
An article on the value of wasps by Dr James Dyke, Lecturer in Complex Systems Simulation, and a members of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group in ECS, appears in todayâs edition of The Conversation, a new online news source from UK universities.
Jamesâs article âWasps deserve to be lovedâ examines the publicâs negative attitude to wasps compared to the importance of the role they play in complex ecosystems â particularly in pollinating species by feeding on nectar, and in feeding solid food, in the form of common garden pests, to their larvae. âIt would be practically impossible to predict the impact of the extinction of even a single species of wasp on the many other creatures and plants it interacts with, directly or indirectly,â comments James.
Drawing a parallel with the legal rights accorded by the UK even to suspected terrorists, as in the recent Abu Qatada case, James concludes that while wasps may be a nuisance, and even life-threatening to some people, they and other species deserve our fullest consideration in terms of the benefit of their activities to the biosphere: âUntil recently, we have simply taken for granted that the other species we share the Earthâs biosphere with contribute greatly to our well being,â he writes. 'In an important way, these hidden benefits are very much like rights â you only notice how vital they were after they are taken away.â
James confesses to being fascinated by the Earth and in particular the way it has been affected by the emergence and evolution of life. âHow did life start on Earth? Is there life elsewhere in the universe? - For as long as I can remember I experience a singular mix of emotions when looking up at the clear night sky,â he says, âsomething that alas doesn't happen very often being a city dweller. My previous job at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry was centrered around the Helmholtz Alliance project, Planetary Evolution and Life, that was coordinated by the German Aerospace Agency.' He is still a member of the NASA Astrobiology Focus Group Thermodynamics, Disequilibrium and Evolution.â
More recently James has become interested in how a particular species is affecting the Earth and what that may mean for life now and in the future. âAnthropogenic Climate Change has become something of a cause celebreâ, he comments, âbut other impacts that Homo sapiens are having on the Earth system are arguably as profound and long-lasting.â
The TDHVL has been growing consistently throughout the past decade. The quality of work and expertise within the TDHVL means that it has gained prestige amongst the international research community, making it a leading research laboratory in the field of High Voltage engineering. Therefore, when a company as such Nokia, with 150-years of commitment to innovation, wanted to explore the viability of using lightning to charge a mobile phone they said that the TDHVL was the obvious first choice for helping them to test the effect of an energy simulation similar to that of the power of lightning on the Nokia Lumia.
TDHVL research is always pushing the boundaries to come up with novel ideas to solve problems. That is why the TDVHL is at the heart of many decision and policy making groups in the area of High Voltage engineering. This industrial partnership with Nokia does just that as Chris Weber, Executive Vice President for Sales & Marketing explains; âThis is a first for any mobile phone company to trial this kind of technology⦠As one of the first companies to introduce wireless charging into our products, we believe that this experiment has the potential to jump-start new ideas on how we charge our phones in the future.â?
âIt is generally accepted that disruptive voltage and currents can damage electronic equipment such as phone charges plugged into the mains. This experiment clearly demonstrates the versatility of the Nokia Lumia 925 phone chargerâ? said Professor Paul Lewin.
The University of Southampton IEEE Branch had a very successful visit to the IEEE UK&RI Student Branch Congress 2013, held earlier this month at the University of Bath.
The Student Congress is held every two years, aimed at bringing together student branches from across the UK and the Republic of Ireland to learn about technology, promoting the IEEE ideals, networking and promoting the sharing of best practice among student branches through learning from each other.
