The University of Southampton

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Published: 17 February 2020
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Developers from Team Zepler Studios demonstrate their egg-pairing platformer, Re:Pair.

Creative teams generated over 20 action-packed games at the University of Southampton as part of the world’s largest game jam.

Around 80 students, alumni and professionals from game studios gathered at Electronics and Computer Science’s (ECS) David Barron Computing Laboratory at the start of February as they joined close to 50,000 developers in over 100 countries taking part in the Global Game Jam.

The teams planned, built and showcased series of video and board games in just 48 hours, with their creations now available to download and play on the Global Game Jam website.

Dr Tom Blount, ECS Research Fellow and Southampton Game Jam co-organiser, says: “The jam is a chance for people to meet, work together, learn new skills and have fun creating something. It isn’t a competition and one of its biggest draws is taking pride and joy in building something to share with others.

“There’s always an interesting mix of games created as a result of the jam but frantic, multiplayer games are always a very popular choice. We had an amazing 23 games submitted this month, which brings our grand total to 156 across the event’s six years.”

This year’s global theme was ‘repair’ and Southampton entries included airship action strategy game Isle of Sky, platformer puzzle Larry the Worm and World War I arcade title Medic!. Point and click special Nuclear BopIt! was voted the 2020 Southampton People’s Choice for its playful take on twisting, tapping and entering passwords to halt a nuclear reactor explosion.

Participants watched a video of keynote speakers from the Global Game Jam on the Friday evening before groups were formed to discuss ideas that could be programmed at pace in the computer labs. Some teams worked through the nights before a Sunday afternoon showcase when everyone could try each other’s games and vote for their favourite.

This year’s teams largely consisted of Southampton Electronics and Computer Science students but also included visitors from the universities of Portsmouth and Bournemouth along with professionals from Climax Studio. In previous years, experts from the Bitmap Bureau, Boss Alien, Freejam and Studio Gobo have also attended.

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Published: 14 February 2020
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Professor Simon Hettrick

A new national competition sponsored by academics from the University of Southampton is diversifying the recognition of research excellence by celebrating all who contribute to its creation.

Professor Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, has marked the launch of the hidden REF with an article on Research Professional News, outlining its objective to credit overlooked achievements from the arts to zoology.

The Research Excellence Framework, or REF, is a widely viewed assessment of the quality of research in UK universities, however its submissions are often dominated by academic publications.

“The research community’s myopic fixation on publications as the metric of research excellence means that the REF overlooks many skilled people who are essential to the conduct of research but do not get authorship of papers,” Simon says.

“Research is about more than publications. By raising awareness of the full range of different and vital outputs, I hope the hidden REF will lead to greater recognition of the variety of people that make research possible. Ultimately, we’re running this competition because we believe a fairer research environment is a more effective one.”

The competition’s first phase, which runs to July this year, is seeking suggestions for categories of research outputs that are currently unrecognised. The second phase will then receive submissions for newly identified research categories and judge them through expert panels before winners are announced in November.

Simon’s opinion piece, Hidden REF reveals unsung heroes, is available in full from Research Professional News.

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- Event

Date:
16th of February, 2018  @  19:00 - 22:00
Venue:
New Mountbatten (53) - 4025
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This is a Chinese New Year event for the Next Generation Wireless Group. All staff and students are invited. Refereshments provided from 19:30.
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Date:
16th of February, 2018  @  13:00 - 14:00
Venue:
Nuffield Theatre (6) - Room 1083
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“Trunnion failure in modern THR: a consequence of hubris?”
Prof Richie Gill

Abstract: This talk is about  the study of  the effect of assembly force on the strength of head-trunnion interface and the initial displacement of the head on the trunnion with different assembly forces.
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Date:
7th of March, 2018  @  13:00 - 14:00
Venue:
New Zepler (59) - 4025
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We present a design methodology for fault-tolerant ASIC that is based on radiation-hard technology, redundant circuits with latchup protection, additional logic and layout implementation steps, and power gating. Enhancements have been made within the standard ASIC design flow in order to incorporate redundancy and power-switch cells and, consequently, enable protection against single-event upset (SEU), single-event transient (SET), and single-event latchup (SEL). In order to validate the proposed fault-tolerant circuits, a fault-injection environment including fault models has been developed. These techniques are being exploited and implemented in the SEPHY project (http://www.sephy.eu). In order to automate a design flow of the fault-tolerant circuits, it is essential to design specific cells which are not present in the standard or radiation-hard design kits. A SEL protection switch (SPS) is described first. It consists of a current sensor/driver, feedback block, control block, and communication interface for a power network controller. Measurement results of the irradiated test circuits with protection switches of different types and sizes will be presented. Afterwards, the details of triple-modular redundant (TMR) and double-modular redundant (DMR) circuits with latchup protection and separated power domains are given. Fault-injection models for TMR and DMR circuits are developed in order to simulate and verify the fault-tolerant designs. Functional simulation of a digital design at the gate level suffices in case of the single-event transient and upset effects. However, in order to provide the information about design behavior during latchup effect, it is required to functionally simulate the design at the transistor level. TMR and DMR circuit simulation results with the implemented fault-injection models for all three types of the mentioned single-event effects will be presented.
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Date:
23rd of January, 2019  @  14:00 - 15:00
Venue:
EEE Building (32) - Room 3077
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Pioneer of the usage and analysis of mobile phone meta-data for development purposes, Flowminder is an award-winning, non-profit organisation funded by the UN Foundation, ECHO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, EU, World Bank, IDB, WFP and others. Flowminder’s mission is to improve public health and welfare in low- and middle-income countries using data from mobile operators, satellite imagery and geo-located household surveys. Much of its work is focuses on understanding, monitoring and predicting the distributions, characteristics and dynamics of human populations, providing insights, tools and capacity building to governments, international agencies and NGOs. Previous works include support to the humanitarian community in multiple disaster response operations (the Haiti 2010 Earthquake, the Nepal Earthquake 2015 and Haiti Hurricane Matthew 2016) and during disease outbreaks (Haiti cholera, DRC Ebola), analysis of migration patterns and social networks to predict poverty, food insecurity and to gain a better understanding of human mobility in crisis. Partner of the WorldPop programme, Flowminder works together with researchers at the University of Southampton, developing and operationalising new approaches to solving developmental and humanitarian challenges.
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