ECS Computer Science student Mike Howell is one of a small group of UK students spending a year in California as part of the Silicon Valley Internship Program (SVIP).

As the high-tech start-up capital of the world, Silicon Valley is an interconnected ecosystem of entrepreneurs, companies, universities and venture capital, with a pervasive attitude of ‘the possible’ that provides the underlying connective tissue that makes it all work.

The Programme provides a unique experience for UK software engineering students, enabling them to spend a year working with hot start-ups in Silicon Valley through a one-year internship. ‘The aim is that through this experience, SVIP interns will bring a little of the Silicon Valley attitude back to the entrepreneurial community in the UK’, says Mike.

The SVIP Interns are matched with Silicon Valley start-ups and work as an integral part of their engineering teams. During the year, the interns attend a variety of conferences and events, as well as regular half-day learning sessions on the entrepreneurial process.

‘I have been based with Nimble Storage, a disruptive data storage company based in San Jose’, says Mike. ‘After a year of rapid expansion Nimble is one of the more mature companies in the program. Hopefully I will soon see first-hand the IPO process as an insider. Nimble has around 500 employees, but most of the start-ups are a lot smaller - some even only have six employees including the three founders.

‘The culture for high tech is great,’ he continues. ‘Interns have meet with Elon Musk, toured Facebook and Google HQ. There are few barriers between the interns, CEO’s, CTO’s and tech super-stars. I feel I can make real lasting networks and connections!’

Mike is also enjoying the Bay Area: ‘This is one of the best play natural grounds I have ever been,’ he says, ‘with ocean to the west and big mountains to the east. There are water and snow sports, and we have already been surfing, sky diving and will be going skiing very soon. The bar and nightlife in San Francisco are also exceptional.’

Applications for the Silicon Valley Internship Program have just opened. More information is available at: Silicon Valley Internship Program (SVIP).

Apply here: http://www.siliconvalleyinternship.com/apply/.

The Programme is only available to EU students.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, one of the world’s leading experts in Web Science and the pioneering co-founder of the A Open Data Institute (ODI), received his knighthood for services to science and engineering, at his Investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace this week (30 October 2013).

Professor Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton and ODI Chairman, is one of the co-creators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is a Director of both the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation - both organisations with a common commitment to advance the world’s understanding of the Web and to promote the Web's positive impact on society. Together with fellow Southampton Professor and inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Shadbolt established the ODI in East London’s Tech City last December. The organisation is a catalyst for innovation, focused on unlocking supply and creating demand for open data to generate economic, environmental and social benefits.

This week, the ODI has announced rapid global expansion of its ambitions, with the launch of 13 international centres, known as ‘nodes’, each of which will bring together companies, universities, and NGOs that support open data projects and communities. The nodes will be based in the US, Canada, France, Dubai, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Argentina, with two extra US nodes Chicago and North Carolina. Three further UK nodes are to open in Manchester, Leeds and Brighton.

In a career spanning some 30 years, Professor Shadbolt has over 400 publications to his credit in topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2009 the Prime Minister appointed Professors Shadbolt and Berners-Lee as Information Advisors to transform access to Public Sector Information. This work led to the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk site that now provides a portal to thousands of datasets.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Southampton added: “This honour is richly deserved and I know that all of his colleagues at the University of Southampton will celebrate his success. Nigel is at the forefront of some of the most important and historic developments of the way in which we use and interact with the web and a true world leader in the field of open data and its benefits to society.â€?

A University of Southampton student has received national recognition from the British Computer Society (BCS) for his research into multi agent systems. This is the third student from the university’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity (AIC) research group to win a Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) award for his thesis, in conjunction with the BCS.

Long Tran-Thanh was selected as runner-up in the Distinguished Dissertation Award 2013 for his dissertation on Budget-limited multi-armed bandits. He also received an honourable mention in the 2012 Dissertation Award sponsored by the European Artificial Intelligence Association (ECCAI).

His thesis explores sequential decision-making and focuses on different multi-armed bandit models with constraints, such as budget limits or pulling restrictions. His research investigates how autonomous agents can make decisions within those models if the information is not known or is uncertain. He is the first to focus on observing the output of that decision-making and has developed efficient algorithms to help balance exploration and exploitation in order to maximise total payoff.

His findings are already attracting interest in real-world applications such as online keyword bidding, decentralised coordination of unmanned autonomous vehicles and crowdsourcing.

Long is the third student from the AIC group to be recognised by the awards. Dr Rajdeep Dash won the Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2007 for his research into computational mechanism design and in 2008 Senior Research Fellow Talal Rahwan also won the prize for his work developing new algorithms to enable greater co-operation between agents.

Professor Nick Jennings, Head of AIC, said: “We are delighted that Long has been recognised for his excellent research. He is the third student from AIC to be recognised by the CPHC and BCS in this way – a fantastic achievement for one research group.â€?

Long said: “I was surprised and pleased to receive this award. It recognises the hard work I have done over the past three years and I hope it will help me in my future career.â€?

The annual CPHC/BCS award selects the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science. Following a rigorous review process involving over 60 technical experts, the judging panel selected four dissertations it regarded as exemplary, one of which was Long’s.

The judging panel said of Long’s dissertation: “The panel thought it was particularly noteworthy that Long’s thesis both makes significant theoretical contributions, and provides solutions which can be beneficially employed in practice.â€?

Long, who was born in Vietnam and grew up in Hungary came to Southampton in 2008 to study his PhD in Computer Science and is now a post doctoral research fellow at the University working on the ORCHID project that investigates how human and software agents can effectively work together to collect the best possible information from a disaster environment.

““When I first came to Southampton I was very impressed by the enthusiasm of the academic staff and I thought I would get good support and motivation here and I was right. I have been here for five years and it has been the best time of my life,â€?“ said Long.

The University of Southampton is launching the new Web Science Institute today (11th November) to investigate how the World Wide Web is changing the world and the world is changing the Web.

The Web is the largest information system ever constructed and a social and technical phenomenon that has transformed the world and continues to do so in innovative and unexpected ways that will shape our future. We can’t predict how the Web will change our society, but Southampton has taken a lead in developing new forms of economic, social, political, technological and cultural resources based on a deep understanding of the Web's technologies and social construction.

The Web Science Institute (WSI) will act as a focal point, co-ordinating and putting into practice education, research and enterprise initiatives on web-related developments at the University of Southampton. Its aim is to secure a sustainable future for multi-disciplinary research across the University that has Web Science at its core by:

• focusing on interdisciplinary collaborations and partnerships; • demonstrating clear ambition, adaptability and innovation; • leveraging the visionary leadership and outstanding staff and student expertise across the University; • providing a platform for significant investment by Government and external partners; • showcasing unique and creative education programmes that set new standards internationally.

The Institute will be directed by a multi-disciplinary team drawn from across the University and led by Web Science pioneers Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall says: “There is a ‘perfect storm’ brewing which combines open data, open education and open research, so this is a very exciting time to be launching the Web Science Institute.â€?

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt says: “The open data movement is one example of how the web is evolving, empowering individuals and communities to achieve phenomenal ends. The Web Science Institute will help us to understand this evolution.â€?

The other WSI Directors are Professor Leslie Carr from the Web Science DTC; Dr Graeme Earl from Humanities; Professor Susan Halford from Social and Human Sciences; and Dr Lisa Harris from Business and Law.

Web Science is the subject of the University’s first ever Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which starts today. The Web Science MOOC, developed by WSI members in partnership with the Centre for Innovation in Technologies and Education (CITE) and Future Learn, will examine the origins and evolution of the Web, and consider key questions of security, democracy, networks and economy from both computational and social science perspective.

Ashley Robinson, final year student on the MEng programme, Electronic Engineering with Artificial Intelligence, has been named as one of four finalists in the competition for this year’s Scholar of the Year, organized by the UK Electronic Skills Foundation.

The winner will be announced at the National Microelectronics Institute annual dinner in London on Thursday 21 November.

Ashley has held a UKESF Scholarship since 2012 and has undertaken two work placements with Cambridge Silicon Radio as part of the programme, working on Near Field Communication with the company’s digital team.

He is positive about the opportunities created by the UKESF programme: ‘It has been of great benefit in terms of consolidating professional skills in the work placements, and helping develop soft skills as well as technical skills in the summer schools’, he said. ‘Also it has been very good to meet engineers from different backgrounds.’

Ashley is currently working intensively on the final-year Group Design Project. His group’s client, Captec, is a leading manufacturer of ruggedized computers, owned and managed by ECS alumnus and Visiting Professor Max Toti. The project aims to provide better monitoring inside the PCs through the incorporation of a UEFI custom application.

Ashley is the third ECS student to reach the final of the Scholar of the Year competition since it was instituted in 2012. In that year ECS student Adam Malpass was named winner, and in 2013 Samuel Hipkin was runner-up. ‘We are very proud of our students’ achievements in UKESF,’ said Professor Neil White, Head of ECS.

‘They have an excellent record in achieving Scholarships, but to have three students reach the finals of Scholar of the Year is outstanding recognition of their ability to transfer their skills from the classroom to the industrial context.’

Jonathon Hare recently returned from the international MediaEval workshop in Barcelona- the concluding meeting of the 2013 international MediaEval multimedia benchmarking challenges on which teams have been working hard on over the last few months.

The team led by Jonathon was up against some of the best multimedia information retrieval and data-mining groups from around the world. Not only did they enter more of the challenges than any of the other teams, of the five challenges entered, they came first in three (social event detection, search diversity and crowdsourcing (working together with Elena Simper and the SOCIAM project of which is the University of Southampton is a founding partner).

Yet the accolades did not stop there, with a team comprised of undergraduates as well as research fellows hard work paid off and they also came second in another challenge (geo-placing) and 4th in the other (search and hyperlinking of video).

Jonathon said, "This was the first year we took part in the MediaEval evaluation, and after a very intense summer working on our entries, it was very pleasing that the performance of our techniques was so good. Our undergraduate interns started with very little practical experience of multimedia analysis, and worked incredibly hard to learn and develop a broad set of techniques to help us achieve the final results."

This was a most impressive set of results and by far the best all round team performance from among the 84 submissions from the 66 teams present. This once again demonstrates the talent that is nurtured across all levels of study in Electronics and Computer Science.

The team was as follows for the placing, hyperlinking, search diversity and event detection tasks: Dr Jonathon Hare (Senior Research Fellow) Dr David Dupplaw (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Sina Samangooei (Research Fellow) Neha Jain (1st year MEng Software Engineering [now in 2nd year]) Jamie Davies (2nd year MEng Computer Science [now in 3rd year]) John Preston (2nd year MEng Computer Science with Mobile and Secure Systems [now in 3rd year])

For the crowdsourcing task: Dr Jonathon Hare (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Elena Simperl (Senior Lecturer) Dr David Dupplaw (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Sina Samangooei (Research Fellow) Maribel Acosta (PhD student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) Anna Weston (just finished BSc Information Technology in Organisations; now iPhD in Web Science)

The University of Southampton is to share in a £350 million fund, which will be used to train over 3,500 post graduate students in engineering and physical sciences, announced today by Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts. This is the UK's largest investment in post graduate training in engineering and physical sciences. It will fund over 70 new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities. The University of Southampton is involved in three new CDTs – The CDT in Next Generation Computational Modelling (CDT NGCM): Computational modelling is a critically important driver for new technology (from the Airbus 380 to MRI scans), new science (from climate change to drug design), and new policy (from infrastructure to finance). The CDT NGCM, which is led by Professor Hans Fangohr from the Computational Modelling Group at the University of Southampton, will work with world-leading industrial partners to train and support at least 11 PhD students per year. The NGCM’s four-year PhD programme will train students to exploit cutting edge new hardware technology and develop innovative simulation methods, which go beyond the state-of-the-art in order to address the most pressing scientific and engineering challenges of the 21st century. For more information on the NGCM, see: www.ngcm.soton.ac.uk and follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/NGCM_Soton. The CDT in New and Sustainable Photovoltaics (PV): This CDT will support the transformation of PV in the UK that will in turn aid the country to achieve its renewable energy obligations, and will generate jobs in the technology sectors as well as local manufacturing and installation. The CDT is a multicentre team of seven institutions – Southampton (represented by Professor Pavlos Lagoudakis from the University’s Hybrid Photonics group), Liverpool, Bath, Sheffield, Oxford, Loughborough and Cambridge – that will train highly-skilled students capable of transforming state-of-the-art research and development across the sustainable energy and PV sectors and, in so doing, contribute to the production and implementation of improved PV products and systems. Professor Philip Nelson, Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Southampton, says: “We are delighted to be participating in three of the Centres for Doctoral Training announced so far. All of these cover areas of research that are vital to our country's future and we are very pleased to be so directly involved in providing the highly skilled scientists and engineers that are crucial to the UK economy.â€? The funding, targeted at areas vital to economic growth, has been allocated by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Science Minister David Willetts said: “Scientists and engineers are vital to our economy and society. It is their talent and imagination, as well as their knowledge and skills, that inspire innovation and drive growth across a range of sectors, from manufacturing to financial services. “I am particularly pleased to see strong partnerships between universities, industry and business among the new centres announced today. This type of collaboration is a key element of our industrial strategy and will continue to keep us at the forefront of the global science race.â€? A total of 1000 partners will be involved in the Centres, leveraging in around £250 million worth of support. Many of the Centres will involve research that connects to key industries and important technologies which will aid innovation and growth. EPSRC may announce a further group of Centres if more resource can be secured. Paul Golby, EPSRC’s Chair, said: “Centres for Doctoral Training have already proved to be a great success and the model is popular with students, business and industry. These new centres will give the country the highly trained scientists and engineers it needs and they will be equipped with skills to move on in their careers. The standard of applications for Centres was very high and more could have been funded if we had the capacity.â€?

For the second time in three years, an ECS student has won the title ‘Scholar of the Year’ awarded by the UKESF (UK Electronic Skills Foundation).

Ashley Robinson, final-year student on the MEng programme, Electronic Engineering with Artificial Intelligence, received the award at the National Microelectronics Institute annual dinner, held last night (21 November) in London.

It was a double success for Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, since Adam Malpass, ECS Electronics graduate from 2012, was named Young Engineer of the Year. Adam, who now works for Dialog Semiconductor, was the first winner of the 'Scholar of the Year' title in 2011.

The UK Electronic Skills Foundation is a collaboration between public bodies, private companies and universities. In addition to connecting employers with students in schools and universities, it runs an annual scholarship programme in which ECS students have been outstandingly successful. The scholarships also include work placement opportunities with leading companies, as well as high-level summer schools with industry participation.

Ashley has held a UKESF Scholarship since 2012 and has undertaken two work placements with Cambridge Silicon Radio, where he has been actively involved in developing NFC chips and LCD controllers. Ashley has also been engaging A-level students at his former school in Hampshire in order to encourage them to experiment with electronics at home. As part of this Ashley has organised lectures for sixth form students, participated in their studies and provided electronics hardware that had been developed at the University of Southampton for them to use.

On winning the award Ashley said: “The scholarship has been a great addition to my academic life, and my experience with CSR and the UKESF professional development workshop will prove invaluable as I start my career when I graduate next year. Through the scholarship I've been able to connect with industry and with other like-minded engineers, so I appreciate the level of competition I was up against to get this award, it's a great honour.â€?

The accolade of ‘Young Engineer of the Year’ awarded to Adam Malpass is the second award he has received in recent weeks, following his commendation at the 2013 British Engineering Excellence Awards for the title of ‘Young Design Engineer of the Year'. Adam visited ECS earlier this week when he was part of the Dialog team that presented a session on an LED-lit future to the IEEE Student Branch.

Southampton’s success in the UKESF Scholar of the Year title can be gauged from the fact that of the eight finalists in the competition over the last three years, four are from ECS: Adam Malpass (Dialog Semiconductor), Tom Dell (McLaren Electronics), Sam Hipkin (ARM), and Ashley Robinson.

‘We are extremely proud of our students’ success,’ said Professor Neil White, Head of Electronics and Computer Science. ‘In our research and our teaching we are committed to making advances of fundamental importance and value to the UK’s electronics industry, and we are delighted to see our students keen to apply the skills they have learned at Southampton with some of the world’s leading electronics companies.’

Researchers from the University of Southampton, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Quebec and Montreal, have developed a new microsystem for more efficient testing of pharmaceutical drugs to treat diseases such as cystic fibrosis, MG (myasthenia gravis) and epilepsy. A large percentage of pharmaceutical drugs target ion channels, which are proteins found in a cell’s membrane, that play a pivotal role in these serious disorders and that are used to test the effectiveness of new drugs. Ion channels create tiny openings in the membrane for specific ions (atoms that are positively or negatively charged) to pass through. Currently researchers use electrophysiology, which measures an electric current through ion channel proteins, to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs on ion channels. However, this can be a slow and expensive process as it is typically carried out using ion channels in living cell membranes. Now, Southampton researchers have been able to produce an ion channel without using cells, which is possible with so-called cell-free expression mixtures, and to insert the channels in a stable artificial cell membrane which should enable faster, less expensive drug testing. The key is that the cell-free expression mixture, which is known to destabilise these membranes, can actually help with incorporating the produced channels into a membrane between two microdroplets. This combination of molecular biology and microtechnology transformed the conventional multi-day, multi-step single ion-channel electrophysiology method into a quick and economical process. “By putting the ion channel into an artificial membrane, we only have one type of channel, no living cells and a relatively inexpensive method for testing for several of these types of channels at once,â€? says lead author of the study Dr Maurits de Planque of the Nano Research Group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. “Researchers have experimented with cell-free mixtures before, but they found that this method was not economical due to the amount of expensive biochemicals required,â€? adds Dr de Planque. “Our proposal to develop a new platform, which uses a couple of microlitres instead of millilitres, will be a very cost-effective way of doing this, particularly when the produced channel is directly inserted in a membrane for drug testing.â€? Study co-author, Biological Sciences lecturer Dr Philip Williamson, from the University’s Institute for Life Sciences, says: “This new technology opens up avenues for drug screening, identifying new leads and identifying off target effects. Off target effects are a major complication in the development of new drugs, and many are withdrawn from late stage clinical trials due to cardiotoxic effects arising from the inhibition of the hERG voltage gated ion channel in the heart. The hERG channel coordinates cardiac rhythm and the availability of cheap and reliable assays to identify these interactions early will help streamline the drug discovery process.â€? The study ‘Single-channel electrophysiology of cell-free expressed ion channels by direct incorporation in lipid bilayers’, which appears in the RSC journal Analyst, is in collaboration with biological scientists in the University’s Institute for Life Sciences. The research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Dr Jonathon Hare and his colleague Dr Sina Samangooei from the University of Southampton’s Web and Internet Science Group have been 3D printing model heads of some well-known people based on obsolete technology.

Sina managed to acquire a number of floppy disks containing 3D scans of people’s heads that were made in the late 80s/early 90s by his dad, who worked for a start-up company doing 3D scanning. These disks and data were in an obscure format that can't be used on today’s computers, so Jon and Sina have been doing a bit of digital archaeology to try and recover the data.

This has been challenging as they had to find various bits of hardware, like floppy drives, that aren't common anymore and also do a lot of digging to understand the format of the disks. They started with no more knowledge than that they came from a 3D scanner in the 1980's and that the format was highly non-standard.

They have now however managed to recover some of the data and get it into a modern format that they can work with and have now managed to print a number of models on a homemade, kit-built, 3D printer. There are 51 scans, of which 27 are complete’ and they’ve printed six unique models so far. Some of the famous people they have modelled include:

Maggie Philbin – British TV presenter; for an episode of Tomorrow’s World Mohammad-Reza Shajarian – Internationally renowned Persian Singer Hussein bin Talal – past King of Jordan Hassan Kassai – Iconic master of Persian classical music

There was also a scan of a sculpture of Grigoris Afxentiou – who is considered a national hero in Cyprus.