Dr. Long Tran-Thanh, a research fellow at University of Southampton, hailing from Hue, Vietnam (but grew up in Budapest, Hungary), is attending Parliament to present his science to a range of politicians and a panel of expert judges, as part of "SET for Britain" on Monday 17 March.

Long’s poster on research about budget-limited multi-armed bandits will be judged against dozens of other mathematicians’ research in the only national competition of its kind.

Long was shortlisted from hundreds of applicants to appear in Parliament.

On presenting his research in Parliament, he said, “As a theoretical research scientist, I believe it is very important to communicate scientific results and their applicability to everyday life to a wider audience. As such, I am very excited about this event as it gives us, research scientists, a fantastic opportunity to convey the message about the importance of science to the decision makers in the government”.

Andrew Miller MP, Chairman of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, said, “This annual competition is an important date in the parliamentary calendar because it gives MPs an opportunity to speak to a wide range of the country’s best young researchers. “These early career engineers, mathematicians and scientists are the architects of our future and SET for Britain is politicians’ best opportunity to meet them and understand their work.”

Long’s research has been entered into the Mathematics session of the competition, which will end in a gold, silver and bronze prize-giving ceremony.

Judged by leading academics, the gold medalist receives £3,000, while silver and bronze receive £2,000 and £1,000 respectively.

Professor Nicholas Woodhouse, President of the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI), sponsors of the Gold Mathematical Sciences award, said, “CMI is delighted to support the inaugural SET for Britain Mathematical Sciences exhibition. The Institute is dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge and supports the work of leading researchers throughout the world at various stages of their careers. The future of mathematics in the UK is both challenging and exciting and we believe it is essential to nurture the best technical talent”.

Sir Adrian Smith, Chair, the Council for the Mathematical Sciences (CMS) said: “The CMS is delighted that the mathematical sciences have been involved in this prestigious event for the very first time; it is a wonderful opportunity to showcase the importance of the mathematical sciences to a wider audience. It is paramount to encourage early-career research scientists, engineers, technologists and mathematicians and the SET for Britain event is a very effective way of doing this. We have been encouraged by the enthusiastic response from early-career researchers in the mathematical sciences and feel sure this will this continue in the future”.

The Parliamentary and Scientific Committee run the event in collaboration with the Council for Mathematical Sciences, the Institute of Physics, The Physiological Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Society of Biology and the Society of Chemical Industry, with financial support from BP, the Clay Mathematics Institute, Essar, INEOS, Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), Germains Seed Technology, Boeing, the Bank of England and the Institute of Biomedical Science.

The University of Southampton is pleased to announce that Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science and a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, has been appointed as its first Regius Professor in Computer Science.

The prestigious title of Regius Professorship was awarded to the University, and 11 other institutions, by HM The Queen last year to mark her Diamond Jubilee. A Regius Professorship is a rare privilege – before the recent awards, only two had been created in the past century. They reflect the exceptionally high-quality of teaching and research at an institution; this is the only Regius Professorship in computer science.

Professor Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems. His research covers both the science and the engineering of these systems. Specifically, he has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, auctions, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation and decentralised control. He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing some of the first real-world systems (in domains such as business process management, energy systems/smart grid, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, and eDefence) and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering.

Professor Jennings also leads the ORCHID programme, which investigates how people can work in partnership with highly inter-connected computational components (agents) as ‘human agent collectives’ (HACs) to manage the response to a disaster.

Professor Jennings says: “It’s great to see such recognition for the department and the discipline of computing more generally. I am delighted and honoured to be the country’s first Regius Professor of Computer Science.”

Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, says: “The award of a Regius Professorship is an honour for the University, the Faculty and Computer Science at Southampton. It represents years of hard work by a world-leading team of people. We are delighted that Professor Jennings is to be the first holder of the post. He is an exceptional scientist and will bring tremendous prestige to the role.”

During the last 26 years, Computer Science at the University of Southampton has grown in scale and global eminence, attracting students and researchers from around the world, providing academic leadership and continuing to define and develop new leading-edge technologies and approaches.

Southampton’s world-leading achievements in Computer Science include the development of pioneering hypermedia systems in the late 1980s, laying the foundations of agent-based computing and intelligent systems since the late 1990s and work on web science since 2000.

Researchers from the University of Southampton have helped to develop a new web application for gathering evidence during natural disasters, which will enable more effective emergency response.

Accurate information can be life-saving in extreme situations, such as earthquakes and tsunamis. However, finding out the accuracy of that information from the vast amount of contradictory material that is posted on social media channels is becoming increasingly difficult. While such channels are useful for identifying and sharing content, they are not the right tools for verification, which requires searching for evidence rather than liking or retweeting.

Verily (www.veri.ly) has been designed by researchers from the University of Southampton, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in the UAE and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) to rapidly crowdsource the verification of information during disasters.

To test whether the platform would be effective, researchers designed the Verily Challenge to prove the feasibility of timely verification.

Various questions were posted to www.veri.ly/crisis/1 and users were invited to submit evidence justifying their answer. A user could not simply submit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for an answer. Instead, they had to verify their position by providing evidence either in the form of an image or video or as text.

For example, a photo of a street was posted with the question: Is this street in Rome. The photo was taken from a personal archive and was actually in the Italian town of Caltagirone in Sicily. The question was answered correctly within four hours by a user who submitted another picture of the same street.

A variety of other techniques and platforms were used to collect evidence: - Foto Forensics helped ascertain the location of a skyscraper. - Google Earth confirmed a Greek lake photo. - Personal memory or extreme searching skill helped determine the location of this window display. - The location of a concrete robot with a heart was identified through a creative Google query.

The success of the challenge confirmed the feasibility of rapid evidence collection. The next step is to deploy Verily for evidence collection during a humanitarian disaster.

Victor Naroditskiy, a research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University, who helped to create Verily, says: “The lack of verifiability of content posted on social media is the main reason preventing humanitarian and news organisations from making a wider use of it.

“The rationale for Verily is that the collective effort of people searching for the truth will be fruitful. Examples of the tremendous power of collective effort can be seen in projects like Wikipedia, and closer to home in experiments like the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge. In this 2009 challenge, 10 red weather balloons moored at secret locations throughout the US were discovered within nine hours through a mass mobilisation over social media channels.”

Verily was invented by Carlos Castillo (QCRI), Patrick Meier (QCRI), Victor Naroditskiy (Southampton) and Iyad Rahwan (Masdar). The technical development of the platform was by Masters students Luis Arenal Mijares, Alex Greenland and Dimitrios Papamiliosin from the Web Technology MSc programme at the University of Southampton led by Enrico Costanza and Victor Naroditskiy. Justine Mackinnon (QCRI) together with the Southampton team organised the public trial of the platform.

Victor and Enrico research crowdsourcing in the context of ORCHID, a multidisciplinary EPSRC-funded project developing the science and technologies for human-agent collectives, with disaster response as a key application area.

You can follow Verily on Twitter @VeriDotLy

Southampton researchers are aiming to improve energy efficiency, cut costs and reduce carbon emissions in the country’s non-domestic buildings.

Southampton is one of six universities (along with Imperial College London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Strathclyde) which will share £3m funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), on behalf of the Research Councils UK Energy Programme (RCUKEP), and £1m from the Technology Strategy Board. The research will address how to use technology, data and information, mathematics and sociology to create better energy strategies and behaviours in public and private, non-domestic buildings.

Non-domestic buildings such as offices, supermarkets, hospitals and factories account for approximately 18 per cent of UK carbon emissions and 13 per cent of final energy consumption. Planning energy saving techniques and implementing change with the cooperation of building occupants is going to be essential.

The Southampton project, which was awarded £493,000 of funding, will examine how external sensors can be used to monitor how windows, blinds and lighting are used and how occupants’ needs, such as privacy, comfort and security, can be balanced with energy management.

Project leader Professor Patrick James, a Senior Lecturer in Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton, says: “In a domestic setting, a householder is directly responsible for the energy bills and would therefore not consciously leave a window open overnight in the winter. In an office environment however, there is no financial driver for people to behave in the same energy efficient manner. While there may be a strong reason to open a window in an office (stuffiness, high temperature), the driver to close the window (energy awareness) may be very weak unless there is an additional driver such as external noise, rain or a security risk.

“This poses a real challenge to the facilities manager, ‘happy productive users’ prefer control of the façade, which is what well designed non-domestic building environments should provide, but providing this control introduces significant energy performance risk.”

“Instrumenting existing buildings with additional physical sensors to monitor this user behaviour is often prohibitively expensive”, continues Professor Alex Rogers, a project co-investigator based in Electronics and Computer Sciences. “We hope to be able to provide useful feedback to a buildings occupants through webpages, ambient displays and smartphones, using a small number of low-cost visible and thermal cameras monitoring the exterior of the building.”

Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC’s Chief Executive and former Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Southampton, adds: “Improving energy efficiency is an important piece of the energy puzzle. Worldwide energy demand is rising, as are global temperatures and sea levels. We need to find smart solutions to how we use energy while improving the environment in which people have to work, rest or play. These projects will go a long way to help improve our understanding of what goes on in non-domestic buildings and add to the armoury at the disposal of those managing these facilities.”

New research has found that malicious behaviour is the norm in crowdsourcing competitions — even when it is in everyone’s interest to cooperate.

Crowdsourcing provides the ability to accomplish information-gathering tasks that require the involvement of a large number of people, often across wide-spread geographies, expertise, or interests.

However, researchers from the University of Southampton and the National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) found that a significant feature of crowdsourcing — its openness of entry — makes it vulnerable to malicious behaviour.

They observed such behaviour in a number of recent popular crowdsourcing competitions, through analysis based on the ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’ scenario, which shows why two purely ‘rational’ individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest.

Co-author Dr Victor Naroditskiy from the University of Southampton says: “Everyone from the ‘crowd’ can contribute to solving the task. This is exactly what makes crowdsourcing so powerful for solving tasks that are all but impossible for a closed group of individuals or an organisation.

“At the same time, the openness makes crowdsourcing solutions vulnerable to malicious behaviour of other interested parties. Malicious behaviour can take many forms, ranging from sabotaging problem progress to submitting misinformation. This comes to the front in crowdsourcing contests where a single winner takes the prize.”

Surprisingly, making the attacks more expensive for the attacker is not an effective way of deterring them. These findings, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, will be important for the design of crowdsourcing competitions, as well as for firms that consider using crowdsourcing to solve a task.

A student from Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton has achieved third place – and best in the UK – in the ninth annual International Microelectronics Olympiad.

Zoltán Beck, a PhD student in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group, was one of 856 participants from 22 countries to take part in the two-stage competition testing the skills of young microelectronics engineers. The first stage involved a written test establishing a baseline understanding of electronic design concepts and techniques. From this, Zoltán was among 42 successful candidates to qualify for an all-expenses paid trip to Synopsys’ headquarters Armenia in October to participate in the final stage of the competition.

Olympiad topics for 2014 included Digital IC Design and Test, Analog and Mixed-Signal IC Design and Test, Semiconductor Devices and Technology, and Mathematic and Algorithmic Issues of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). The final stage of the competition involved a challenging contest consisting of advanced engineering tasks requiring complex solutions.

The event is held in cooperation with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Test Technology Technical Council and its mains sponsors are Synopsys Armenia and VivaCell-MTS. Zoltán Beck’s prize was sponsored by the Enterprise Incubator Foundation.

The University of Southampton’s goFIT activity and movement challenge has been recognised as an example of best practice by the European Network of Academic Sport Services (ENAS).

goFIT formed a central component of the ‘One Big Thing’ project from Imperial College London, which won the BEST Practice Award at the 2014 ENAS Conference in Lille, France this week.

The goFIT software platform and movement challenge aims to increase the well-being and physical activity of staff and students. The goal is to increase minutes of physical activity each week, which can be as easy as taking the stairs instead of the lift or getting off at a further bus stop and walking a bit more into work.

Professor m.c. schraefel from Electronics and Computer Science, who designed goFIT, said: “Our research is all about how we can design technology to help people connect with each other, and connect with better wellbeing practices. We’d be overjoyed to see every university in the UK and EU running a goFIT challenge - let’s make it happen.”

Following a successful trial at Southampton, Imperial College London, was the first institution to implement the initiative and incorporated it into their own wellbeing activities, which culminated with the One Big Thing ‘5K anyway’ event.

Neil Mosley, Director of Sport at Imperial College London, said: “We love goFIT - we support m.c.’s aspiration to have goFIT help create a health practice data picture of wellbeing in the UK. There’s not just the challenge; there’s great content there too - from how to videos to first person accounts of getting more fit. For us, we love how we can customise goFIT to promote our events and how it gives our movement events a real target to get people together.

“At the recent ENAS conference, with people who run sport programs from all over Europe, there was tremendous interest in using the goFIT platform to run challenges from Ireland to Portugal.”

goFIT connected with hundreds of Southampton students and some staff last year and it will be running again January 2015 at Southampton, Imperial College London and City University London. If your institution or organisation is interested in participating, please visit gofit.ac.uk or contact Professor schraefel at mc+gofit@ecs.soton.ac.uk and follow her on Twitter @mcphoo

The University of Southampton has come out top in the UK for Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF) results. The REF also shows 100 per cent of the impact of our Computer Science research activity is world-leading or internationally excellent.

The 2014 REF assesses the quality and impact of research submitted by UK universities. The results will be used by higher education funding bodies in the UK to allocate almost £2 billion of research funding per year from 2015-16.

Results from the REF 2014 have confirmed the volume and quality of our research in Electrical and Electronic Engineering as being the best in the UK with 97 per cent of our research outputs rated as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Additionally, the volume and quality of our Computer Science research is in the top 10 in the UK with 100 per cent of its impact being recognised as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Professor Neil White, Head of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, said “This is an excellent achievement and a superb recognition of our commitment to research work that is world-leading and transformative. Our staff, industry partners and research funders can take pride in these outstanding results and our students can be assured of the research-led education they take part in.”

Read about the impact of ECS’ research on web science, energy, agent technologies, open data and more in our case studies.

Cutting edge research into engineering at the University of Southampton is further recognised with General Engineering also being ranked as first in the UK by the 2014 REF.

Overall, Southampton is ranked 11th in the UK based on the volume and quality of its research. Over 97 per cent of the University’s research environment has been assessed as world-leading and internationally excellent. Nearly 90 per cent of its research has been assessed as having world-leading and internationally excellent impact.

The University’s full REF results are available at: www.ref.ac.uk.

Joulo, a spin-out from the University of Southampton, has been acquired by Quby, Europe’s leading developer of smart thermostats and energy displays.

Joulo, co-founded by Dr Reuben Wilcock and Professor Alex Rogers from Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, develops smart energy monitoring technology that delivers insight into heating systems, allowing customers to save money on their energy bills and make their homes more comfortable. Joulo was tipped as the UK’s brightest home tech startup when it won first place at the 2013 British Gas Connecting Homes competition.

Through the acquisition of Joulo, Quby adds advanced algorithms, developed by world experts in artificial intelligence, to its portfolio. At the same time Quby acquires a simple and elegant hardware product, the Joulo USB temperature logger. The Joulo logger enables utility companies to engage both existing and new customers in discussions about heating, energy savings, insulation and comfort.

Dr Reuben Wilcock said: "Quby is a great match for Joulo and I am delighted about this acquisition. I am confident that Quby will have great success taking Joulo to international markets whilst continuing to develop the underlying algorithms. In Quby’s hands, I have no doubt that Joulo will soon make an appearance in millions of homes across the world."

Professor Alex Rogers added: "It’s very exciting to see our fundamental research being developed into a consumer product. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Quby grows Joulo in the home energy market over the coming years."

Joris Jonker, CEO of Quby, commented on the deal: “We are excited to announce this acquisition. The founders of Joulo have developed a great product, and we are proud to have the opportunity to bring it to market. At the same time, this is a great opportunity for Quby to become more active in the UK by using Joulo as a springboard for our smart thermostat offering.”

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Regius Professor Nick Jennings has been selected to advance the world-leading teaching and research of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

Professor Jennings, a Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, will assume the high-profile post as head of the ECS in August.

He replaces Professor Neil White, who completes an accomplished term of four and a half years which maintained the academic unit’s reputation as one of the best places in the world to study electronics, electrical engineering, computer science, web science and IT.

“I’m delighted and honoured to be the next head of ECS,” Professor Jennings said. “It’s a fantastic department with great staff and students.

“I look forward to seeing us continue to lead nationally and internationally in our research, education and enterprise endeavours and to making the most of the fact that we combine computer science and electronics in the same department.”

Professor Jennings’ expertise in the areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and agent-based computing led to an appointment last year as the UK’s inaugural Regius Professor of Computer Science.

Across a distinguished career, he has generated more than £23 million in research grants, published more than 550 articles and graduated more than 40 PhD students.

Professor Bashir M Al-Hashimi, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, said: “Nick has been doing some excellent work and I’m looking forward to working with him as Head of ECS and as a member of our Faculty Executive Group.

“This outstanding academic unit has a rich history in innovative research and enterprise combined with world-leading education, and I am confident that Nick is the best person to take it forward to even greater success.”

The University of Southampton is rated first in the UK for the volume and quality of research in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and 100 per cent of Computer Science research impact was recognised as world-leading or internationally excellent in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework.

The institution is in the UK top 3 for Electronics and Electrical Engineering and the UK top 10 for Computer Science and IT, according to the Guardian University Guide and Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2015.