The University of Southampton’s world-leading achievements in autonomous systems and artificial intelligence will be celebrated at a special event in London this week to mark the inaugural lecture of Professor Nick Jennings of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), who has been awarded a Regius Professorship in Computer Science.

The event, which is taking place on Tuesday 9 June at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, will demonstrate cutting-edge work with examples drawn from state-of-the-art EPSRC and EU-funded projects including:

• Advanced design and methodology tools that help build and fly sub-20kg state of the art fixed and rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with full autonomous control systems and on-board cameras.
• A toolset that provides testing and analysis of autonomous systems based on realistic scenarios before they are built. The toolset is already being applied to applications involving the safety assurance of intelligent control in smart grids, railway interlocking and UAVs.
• Low-cost autonomous robots, such as the Delphin II and the Octopus Robot, that operate in challenging marine environments with a high degree of reliability and minimal environmental impact.
• Light, unmanned aircraft that deliver scientific instruments to extreme altitudes to improve the accuracy of weather prediction and climate models.

Professor William Powrie, Dean of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Southampton, says: “Engineering at Southampton is about the development and application of pioneering science to provide practical solutions to issues of global and societal importance. Our submissions to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) were judged the most powerful in their units of assessment. As the first of what we hope will become an annual event, this showcase demonstrates our internationally-renowned research that is shaping the future of our world.”

Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the University of Southampton, adds: “Algorithms and software have a tremendous impact on society, from the Internet and consumer electronics to healthcare and transportation. Autonomous systems, built on these intelligent algorithms and software, will be one of the most powerful tools in tackling global challenges.”

The University of Southampton was one of just 12 UK institutions awarded a Regius Professorship by HM The Queen to mark her Diamond Jubilee and the only institution ever to be awarded a Regius Professor in Computer Science. A Regius Professorship reflects the exceptionally high quality of teaching and research at an institution and is a rare privilege – before the recent awards, only two had been created in the past century.

Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science and a Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and agent-based computing. Professor Jennings has pioneered the application of multi-agent technology developing real world systems and leads the innovative ORCHID programme investigating how people and software agents can effectively work together to improve disaster response operations and enable smart energy systems.

Professor Jennings says: “It is a great honour for Southampton to be awarded a Regius Chair in Computer Science and reflects extremely well on the quality of research and teaching of the whole department over many years. I’m honoured to be the inaugural post holder and will endeavour to use it as a platform to highlight the fundamental importance of computer science to modern society.”

Professor Jennings will also be joined by a number of academics, business leaders and government advisors such as Professor Sir Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Advisor to HM Government and Head of the Government Office for Science, in panel-led discussions throughout the day.

The University of Southampton is to play a major role in helping to boost the UK’s ability to develop and exploit the vast potential of robotics and autonomous systems.

Southampton is one of the founding partners of the EPSRC UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Network (UK-RAS Network), which will bring together the country’s key academic capabilities in robotics innovation under national coordination for the first time. It will encourage academic and industry collaborations to accelerate the development and adoption of robotics and autonomous systems.

The Network was unveiled last week at the Science Museum in London following a public lecture on Robot Ethics, organised by IET Robotics and Mechatronics Network in association with the Science Museum Lates and supported by the EPSRC UK-RAS Network.

As the UK’s leading university for unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) research and education, the University of Southampton will be active in the Network across many areas. In particular, aerial vehicles through the DECODE (Decision Environment for COmplex DEsign) project to design, build and fly state-of-the-art unmanned air vehicles with full autonomous control systems and robotics for Earth Science as part of the ASTRA initiative, which develops cutting-edge low-cost robotic systems for observing the atmosphere.

Dr Stephen Prior, Reader in Unmanned Air Vehicles at the University of Southampton, says: “Our involvement in the EPSRC UK-RAS Network reflects our global reputation for robotics and autonomous systems research and development. We have the capabilities and resources to help the UK economy address the demands of this challenging technology across all sectors of industry, from transport and healthcare to manufacturing and unmanned systems.”

Professor Nick Jennings, forthcoming Head of Electronics and Computer Science added: “Our involvement reflects the quality of work on autonomous systems carried out in Southampton. This ranges from the hardware and novel manufacturing techniques to the advanced software required for decision making in complex and fast changing environments.” Professor Jennings leads the innovative ORCHID programme investigating how people and software agents, including those within UAVs, can effectively work together to improve disaster response operations and enable smart energy systems.

The EPSRC UK-RAS Network is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – the UK's main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. The Network’s mission is to provide academic leadership in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, expand collaboration with industry and integrate and coordinate activities at eight EPSRC-funded RAS dedicated facilities and Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) across the UK.

The new network has already received strong support by major industrial partners, the Science Museum and the UK’s major professional engineering bodies including Royal Academy of Engineering, IET, and the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. The Network will expand to include broader stakeholders including key national laboratories in the UK and leading international collaborators in both academia and industry. The global market for service and industrial robots is estimated to reach $59.5 billion by 2020.

Kedar Pandya, Head of the Engineering Theme for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, added: “Working with Innovate UK and other research council partners, EPSRC's mission is to support and invest in the world-leading research base that has earned the UK its deserved reputation for research excellence. Robotics and Autonomous Systems are one of the Eight Great Technologies in which the UK is set to be a global leader, and the technology being developed at these EPSRC-funded RAS facilities will deliver a significant impact on the research landscape, and attract the kind of industrial investment that will maximise the UK’s stake in the worldwide robotics market.”

The Network will organise a wide range of activities including network and strategic events such as the UK Robotics conference, symposia and focused workshops, public engagement and exhibitions. It will also have extensive online engagement activities using social media and web and user forums. The Network aims to strengthen the relationship with industry by supporting interdisciplinary mobility and industrial secondment and developing proof-of-concept (PoC) projects and running design challenges. There is also a strong emphasis on government policy and high-level engagement with international stakeholders.

Southampton’s MSc in Cyber Security is one of just six UK university degree programmes to receive certified status by GCHQ in 2015.

British intelligence agency GCHQ, as the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, sets the standard for good cyber security education in the UK. Its certification programme recognises the MSc in Cyber Security from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) as providing well-defined and appropriate degree content, delivered to the highest standard, based on GCHQ’s rigorous assessment criteria. This assessment included expert views of industry, academia, professional bodies, GCHQ and other government departments.

This endorsement further demonstrates the high quality of Southampton’s work in cyber security. The University’s’ Cyber Security Research Centre is one of only thirteen Academic Centres of Excellence status identified by to help make the UK government, businesses and consumers more resilient to cyber-attack by extending knowledge through original research and providing top-quality graduates in the field of cyber security.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone of ECS and leader of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security, said: “We are very pleased to have our Master's degree recognised through GCHQ’s certified status, which complements the world-leading research undertaken through our Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security. Students on this programme will benefit from a very high quality learning experience while future employers can be assured of their skills in cyber security.”

Dr Tim Chown of ECS and Programme leader for the MSc in Cyber Security, added: “Our Cyber Security MSc has proved to be very popular, with students enrolling from all around the world."

The MSC in Cyber Security has achieved provisional status. Provisional certification is for those Master’s degrees which are currently running but have not yet had a cohort complete in the current academic year. It is based on students’ module choice including Foundations of Cyber Security; Implementing Cyber Security; Software Engineering and Cyber Security; Cyber Crime, Insecurity and the Dark Web; Secure Systems; Cryptography.

This round of accreditation by GCHQ brings the total number of UK Master’s degrees in Cyber Security with certified status to 12.

Chris Ensor, Deputy Director for the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance at GCHQ, said: “As the National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, GCHQ recognises the critical role academia plays in developing the UK's skill and knowledge base. I am delighted that six more Master’s degrees in general cyber security have been certified.”

For more information on GCHQ’s work with universities see UK Cyber Security Research and Education.

Researchers from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton are at the forefront of a new science that is finding ways in which computers can work intelligently in partnership with people. This could support the management of some of today's most challenging situations, such as the aftermath of major disasters and smart energy systems.

The five-year ORCHID project has looked at how we work with computers: instead of issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with agents, highly interconnected computational components that are able to act autonomously and intelligently, forming human-agent collectives (HACs).

Agents can be in sensors collecting and analysing information to give the ‘bigger picture’ of an emergency situation as it develops or in a smart meter monitoring the energy consumption of your home, recommending how you might adapt your usual routine to reduce both the cost of the energy that you consume and its carbon content.

On 22 September at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, there will be a showcase of world-leading ORCHID research from the fields of energy systems, citizen science and disaster response. The event will feature keynote talks from project leaders, presentations of case studies and demonstrations of technologies such as:

• Joulo - a home heating advice system that uses a low-cost temperature logger and online algorithms to provide feedback to households on how they are using their current heating system, along with autonomous intelligent home heating agents that can learn the householders’ comfort preferences in order to provide efficient comfortable heat control.
• AtomicORCHID - a mobile mixed-reality game in which first responders work together with a response headquarters to rescue as many casualties as possible. This game has allowed researchers to study team coordination and understand how human responders can be supported by computational agents that assist the planning and execution of the rescue mission, including the coordination of multi-UAV deployments.
• Japan Nuclear Crowd Map platform - Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, citizen scientists deployed sensors and uploaded data to help track the spread of airborne radioactive particles. To identify accurate information from some many sources, the platform combines reports from thousands of sensors and uses machine learning algorithms to correct for biases and noise and weed out those sensors that are defective.

The £10m EPSRC-funded project has brought together around 60 researchers from the universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, Secure Meters UK Ltd, Rescue Global and the Australian Centre of Field Robotics. It is led by Professor Nick Jennings, who leads the University of Southampton’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group – the largest research group of its kind in the world.

Professor Jennings says: “This vision of people and computational agents operating at a global scale offers tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help us meet the key societal challenges of sustainability, inclusion, and safety that are core to our future.

“This shift is needed to cope with the volume, variety and pace of the information and services that are available. It is simply unfeasible to expect individuals to be aware of the full range of potentially relevant possibilities and to be able to pull them together manually. Computers need to step up to the plate and proactively guide users’ interactions based on their preferences and constraints. In so doing, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines.”

More about ORCHID: ORCHID has brought together researchers from around the world and made fundamental scientific breakthroughs and shown how these can be used to build practical applications that have been tested ‘in the wild’. The project has employed and trained 50 research fellows and PhD students. It has generated over 200 publications, of which 40 are collaborations between the partners and half involve an international co-author. The ORCHID legacy includes the development of 25 new academic collaborations and follow-on grants worth £15m. ORCHID researchers have organised 25 major conferences and workshops and won over 20 prizes, awards and best papers.

ORCHID has engaged with a variety of audiences, generating media coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, New Scientist, WIRED, the Economist and the Emergency Times. Its work has been demonstrated and presented at public events such as the British Science Festival, ‘I’m a scientist’, BBC Summer of Wildlife and Farnborough Air Show. ORCHID has also provided masterclasses for organisations including Toyota, British Gas Connected Homes, British Council on Disaster Response and South East Regional Cyber Crime Unit.

A number of technologies have been pulled through by industry, via engagement with over 40 organisations. ORCHID research has generated six patents in areas such as crowd-sourcing, sensor data processing and machine learning, and has released software for problems as diverse as non-intrusive load monitoring, tracking provenance and mobility analysis.

With an ever increasing number of everyday objects from our homes, workplaces and even from our wardrobes, getting connected to the Internet - examples of the ‘Internet of Things (IoT) - researchers from the University of Southampton have identified easy-to-use techniques to configure IoT objects, to make them more secure and hence help protect them from online attacks.

This increased connectivity brings additional risk. Setting personalised and strong passwords when connecting new devices to the Internet, for example through our home Wi-Fi networks, can mitigate such risks. However, many IoT devices have limited interfaces: just a few buttons (if any at all) and light indicators, making it challenging for users to configure them. If secure configuration becomes complicated, users may choose easier, less secure options that leave their devices vulnerable.

Southampton researchers compared four interaction techniques for the configuration of IoT devices, looking for methods that allowed security, but were quick and easy to use. All four techniques used the smartphone touchscreen to let users enter secure passwords.

Two of the techniques used a more ‘traditional’ approach by connecting the smartphone and the IoT device through a USB or audio cable, via the smartphone’s headphone socket. The third technique used a ‘Wi-Fi-only approach, where the smartphone creates a special temporary Wi-Fi network, or ‘ad-hoc network’, to which the IoT device automatically connects before being redirected to the correct permanent network. The final option was the smartphone and the IoT device exchanging information through light: the smartphone's screen flashed black and white to mean binary 'zero' or 'one'; the IoT device read this light/binary pattern to learn the password from the smartphone. The results, which are presented at the ACM Ubicomp 2015 conference in Japan this week, found that two of the techniques were noticeably more usable than the others - the audio cable and the Wi-Fi-only interactions.

Study co-author Dr Enrico Costanza, from the Agents, Interaction, Complexity Group in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, says: “IoT objects can be attacked and possibly hijacked, putting our privacy, data and safety in question. We believe that our results can help designers and researchers make IoT devices, and especially their configuration, more usable and therefore secure. Moreover, we believe that not enough attention has been placed on how to make the IoT easy to use and to configure, so we hope that our results will motivate others in researching this topic.”

Further information

This work was supported in part by the EPSRC C-tECh (EP/K002589/1) and CharIoT (EP/L02392X/1) projects. A copy of the research paper ‘Connecting the Things to the Internet: An Evaluation of Four Configuration Strategies for Wi-Fi Devices with Minimal User Interfaces’ by Jewell, Michael O., Costanza, Enrico and Kittley-Davies, Jacob (2015) is available at: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/379702/

Watch a video about the project at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go10n6s39mg

Professor mc schraefel writes for The Conversation about Facebook’s new intelligent assistant, M, and how such services could be shrinking our online options.

The “digital assistant” is proliferating, able to combine intelligent natural language processing, voice-operated control over a smartphone’s functions and access to web services. It can set calendar appointments, launch apps, and run requests. But if that sounds very clever – a computerised talking assistant, like HAL9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey – it’s mostly just running search engine queries and processing the results.

Facebook has now joined Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon with the launch of its digital assistant M, part of its Messaging smartphone app. Its special sauce is that M is powered not just by algorithms but by data serfs: human Facebook employees who are there to ensure that every request that it cannot parse is still fulfilled, and in doing so training M by example. That training works because every interaction with M is recorded – that’s the point, according to David Marcus, Facebook’s vice-president of messaging: We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do. Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time.

Facebook, through M, will capture and facilitate that “intent to buy” and take its cut directly from the subsequent purchase rather than as an ad middleman. It does this by leveraging messaging, which was turned into a separate app of its own so that Facebook could integrate PayPal-style peer-to-peer payments between users. This means Facebook has a log not only of your conversations but also your financial dealings. In an interview with Fortune magazine at the time, Facebook product manager, Steve Davies, said: People talk about money all the time in Messenger but end up going somewhere else to do the transaction. With this, people can finish the conversation the same place started it.

In a somewhat creepy way, by reading your chats and knowing that you’re “talking about money all the time” – what you’re talking about buying – Facebook can build up a pretty compelling profile of interests and potential purchases. If M can capture our intent it will not be by tracking what sites we visit and targeting relevant ads, as per advert brokers such as Google and Doubleclick. Nor by targeting ads based on the links we share, as Twitter does. Instead it simply reads our messages.

Talking about money, money talks

M is built to carry out tasks such as booking flights or restaurants or making purchases from online stores, and rather than forcing the user to leave the app in order to visit a web store to complete a purchase, M will bring the store – more specifically, the transaction – to the app.

Suddenly the 64% of smartphone purchases that happen at websites and mobile transactions outside of Facebook, are brought into Facebook. With the opportunity to make suggestions through eavesdropping on conversations, in the not too distant future our talking intelligent assistant might say: I’m sorry Dave, I heard you talking about buying this camera. I wouldn’t do if I were you Dave: I found a much better deal elsewhere. And I know you’ve been talking about having that tattoo removed. I can recommend someone – she has an offer on right now, and three of your friends have recommended her service. Shall I book you in?

Buying a book from a known supplier may be a low risk purchase, but other services require more discernment. What kind of research about cosmetic surgery has M investigated? Did those three friends use that service, or were they paid to recommend it? Perhaps you’d rather know the follow-up statistics than have a friend’s recommendation.

Still, because of its current position as the dominant social network, Facebook knows more about us, by name, history, social circle, political interests, than any other single internet service. And it’s for this reason that Facebook wants to ensure M is more accurate and versatile than the competition, and why it’s using humans to help the AI interpret interactions and learn. The better digital assistants like M appear to us, the more trust we have in them. Simple tasks performed well builds a willingness to use that service elsewhere – say, recommending financial services, or that cosmetic treatment, which stand to offer Facebook a cut of much more costly purchase.

No such thing as a free lunch

So for Facebook, that’s more users spending more of their time using its services and generating more cash. Where’s the benefit for us?

We’ve been trained to see such services as “free”, but as the saying goes, if you don’t pay for it, then it’s you that’s the product. We’ve seen repeatedly in our Meaningful Consent Project that it’s difficult to evaluate the cost to us when we don’t know what happens to our data.

People were once nervous about how much the state knew of them, with whom they associated and what they do, for fear that if their interests and actions were not aligned with those of the state they might find ourselves detained, disappeared, or disenfranchised. Yet we give exactly this information to corporations without hesitation, because we find ourselves amplified in the exchange: that for each book, film, record or hotel we like there are others who “like” it too.

The web holds a mirror up to us, reflecting back our precise interests and behaviour. Take search, for instance. In the physical world of libraries or bookshops we glance through materials from other topics and different ideas as we hunt down our own query. Indeed we are at our creative best when we absorb the rich variety in our peripheral vision. But online, a search engine shows us only things narrowly related to what we seek. Even the edges of a web page will be filled with targeted ads related to something known to interest us. This narrowing self-reflection has grown ubiquitous online: on social networks we see ourselves relative to our self-selected peers or idols. We create reflections.

The workings of Google, Doubleclick or Facebook reveal these to be two-way mirrors: we are observed through the mirror but see only our reflection, with no way to see the machines observing us. This “free” model is so seductive – it’s all about us – yet it leads us to become absorbed in our phones-as-mirrors rather than the harder challenge of engaging with the world and those around us.

It’s said not to look too closely at how a sausage is made for fear it may put you off. If we saw behind the mirror, would we be put off by the internet? At least most menus carry the choice of more than one dish; the rise of services like M suggests that, despite the apparent wonder of less effortful interactions, the internet menu we’re offered is shrinking.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

mc schraefel is Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance within Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

The University of Southampton is launching a Cyber Security Academy to help make government, businesses and consumers more resilient to cyber-attack.

The Southampton Cyber Security Academy (CSA) is a partnership between the University of Southampton and world-leading industry and Government partners to provide a focal point for cyber security research, education and outreach. The first partners of the Academy are the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), Northrop Grumman and Roke Manor Research with further partners across a range of industries joining as the Academy grows into a vibrant community of businesses, centred in the South of England but with global influence.

The CSA was announced at a special signing today (Monday 9 November) during the IA15 event in London, hosted by GCHQ and Department for Culture, Media and Sport and supported by leaders from across Government, industry and academia. The CSA is one of the first examples of the UK Government’s CyberInvest initiative, also announced at IA15.

Professor Vladimiro Sassone of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group within Electronics and Computer Science is Director of the Academy. He said: “The increasingly alarming statistics on cyber-attacks and crime on a variety of targets, such as the recent TalkTalk data hack, make the Academy a timely initiative fully aligned with the UK National Cyber Security Strategy.

“The span of problems is huge, including the protection of critical infrastructures, of industrial and economic processes, of government, businesses and users’ data, privacy and interests. There is a pressing demand for cyber security, and in the next 20 years cyber research will have the same kind of momentous social and economic impact as medical research had in the twentieth century.”

David Cole, Managing Director of Roke, said: “In order to meet the demands of an increasing cyber security threat, the UK needs a continual flow of high quality engineers and consultants to protect our critical infrastructure and enterprises, and to protect personal data. The Cyber Security Academy partners will work together to drive forward the UK’s cyber capability and talent - attracting and developing world class experts into the cyber security industry, facilitating technology innovation, creating new opportunities and driving UK productivity.”

The CSA will provide a stream of cyber security graduates to industry and train existing workforce through an industry-relevant CPD program in Cyber Security. It will also lead innovative research, consultancy and enterprise activities, creating new employment opportunities by attracting companies and talented individuals interested in cyber security and related sectors.

Professor Sassone added: “With society growing ever more cyber-dependent, cyber security poses tremendous challenges and tremendous opportunities for the cyber industry. It also calls for systematic innovation that will have to pass through research and recruitment of fresh cyber talent. In other words, through a closer interaction between industry and academia.”

The Cyber Security Academy, based in the Academic Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) at the University of Southampton, is due to formally launch in early 2016. For more information about the Academy and how to participate, go to: www.southampton.ac.uk/csa

The University of Southampton is one of just 13 Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research, leading the national agenda to protect against cyber threats. The University of Southampton was awarded ACE-CSR status in November 2013 by GCHQ with a remit to extend knowledge through original research and provide high-quality graduates in the field of cyber security. ECS' MSc in Cyber Security is one of just 12 in the UK to be awarded Provisional Certification against the GCHQ Certified Master's degree in General Cyber Security standard, subject to a specific set of modules.

Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to a professor from Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton.

Professor Richard Watson says new research shows that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.

By unifying the theory of evolution (which shows how random variation and selection is sufficient to provide incremental adaptation) with learning theories (which show how incremental adaptation is sufficient for a system to exhibit intelligent behaviour), this research shows that it is possible for evolution to exhibit some of the same intelligent behaviours as learning systems (including neural networks).

In an opinion paper, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Professors Watson and Eörs Szathmáry, from the Parmenides Foundation in Munich, explain how formal analogies can be used to transfer specific models and results between the two theories to solve several important evolutionary puzzles.

Professor Watson of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group says: “Darwin’s theory of evolution describes the driving process, but learning theory is not just a different way of describing what Darwin already told us. It expands what we think evolution is capable of. It shows that natural selection is sufficient to produce significant features of intelligent problem-solving.”

"For example," Watson continues, "a key feature of intelligence is an ability to anticipate behaviours that will lead to future benefits. Conventionally, evolution, being dependent on random variation, has been considered ‘blind’ or at least ‘myopic’ – unable to exhibit such anticipation. But showing that evolving systems can learn from past experience means that evolution has the potential to anticipate what is needed to adapt to future environments in the same way that learning systems do.

“When we look at the amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces, it takes some imagination to understand how random variation and selection produced them. Sure, given suitable variation and suitable selection (and we also need suitable inheritance) then we’re fine. But can natural selection explain the suitability of its own processes? That self-referential notion is troubling to conventional evolutionary theory – but easy in learning theory.

“Learning theory enables us to formalise how evolution changes its own processes over evolutionary time. For example, by evolving the organisation of development that controls variation, the organisation of ecological interactions that control selection or the structure of reproductive relationships that control inheritance – natural selection can change its own ability to evolve.

“If evolution can learn from experience, and thus improve its own ability to evolve over time, this can demystify the awesomeness of the designs that evolution produces. Natural selection can accumulate knowledge that enables it to evolve smarter. That’s exciting because it explains why biological design appears to be so intelligent.”

The University of Southampton is to work closely with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to develop cybersecurity solutions for smart traffic control systems.

The project is one of six new joint research collaborations announced between UK and Singapore-based researchers to develop new solutions that will enhance the resilience of systems and infrastructure to cyber attacks. The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Singapore’s National Research Foundation will jointly fund the projects worth £2.4 million ($5.1 million) over the next three years.

Led by Nick Jennings, the University of Southampton’s Regius Professor of Computer Science and Head of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), the project will study human-agent collectives (HAC), in which humans work in partnership with highly interconnected computational components. For example, sensors in mobile devices that collect and analyse information to give the ‘bigger picture’ of an emergency situation as it develops.

The study will also use game theory to discover and analyse major attack scenarios and focus on resource-constrained online machine learning to develop real-time defence mechanisms.

“With the increasing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, there is a higher demand to make these systems more secure, in order to gain trust and acceptance from the wider communities,” said project co-ordinator Dr Long Tran-Thanh, Lecturer in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group within ECS. “As such, the success of our project would be a proof of concept that our cyber security solution could be efficiently applied to IoT systems. This would bring us one step closer to the realisation of smart societies, where secure IoT plays an essential role.

“As the traffic network is one of the key national strategic infrastructures, making it secure from possible attacks without creating major disturbances within its normal everyday usage would be crucial,” Dr Tran-Thanh continued. “Given this, the success of our project would provide the first efficient solution to this problem, from which the nation would significantly benefit.

“We are quite confident that this project will be successful and will provide a strong impact to both the cyber security and the IoT communities, respectively,” Dr Tran-Thanh continued. “In particular, our partners, Assistant Professors Bo An and Mo Li from the School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), will add their excellent knowledge in security game theory and IoT hardware systems, respectively, in order to complement our expertise in machine learning and HAC systems.”

Assistant Professor Bo An, an expert in artificial intelligence and game theory at NTU, said: “Traffic systems are important infrastructures that have to be protected at the highest security levels, since their high automation and computerisation makes them prime targets for cyber-attacks. A successful cyber-attack by criminals into the traffic system would give them the ability to create chaos, causing heavy traffic on roads, and even to block law enforcement vehicles and to create escape routes.

“Our novel idea in this research project, is to combine game theory and machine learning so that we can detect suspicious behaviour and activity in advance, and to develop mechanisms that could mitigate cyber-attacks on smart traffic systems. In short – we aim to have smart traffic systems in future that will know when and how it is being hacked, adapt to these attacks, and obstruct the hackers every step of the way.”

Southampton is leading the national agenda to protect against cyber threats as one of 13 Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research in the UK. The University was awarded ACE-CSR status in November 2012 by GCHQ with a remit to extend knowledge through original research and provide high-quality graduates in the field of cyber security. In November, the University launched a new Cyber Security Academy to help make government, businesses and consumers more resilient to cyber-attack.

Nick Jennings, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, has been made Companion of the Order of the Bath in the Queen’s New Year Honours List for his services to computer science and national security science.

Professor Jennings, who is Head of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University, has been recognised for his pioneering contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and agent-based computing. He is the UK’s only Regius Professor in Computer Science, a prestigious title awarded to the University by HM The Queen to mark her Diamond Jubilee.

He has just finished a six-year term of office as the Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government in the area of National Security. He was the inaugural post holder and helped ensure that the best possible use of science and technology is made for national security purposes.

Professor Jennings said: “I am delighted to receive such an award and feel it is recognition for the excellent teams I have worked with, both in the University and in Government. It’s been a real privilege to see fledgling ideas pulled through into real-world applications in both roles”

An internationally-recognised authority in the areas of agent-based computing and intelligent systems, Professor Jennings research covers both the science and the engineering of these systems. He is a member of the University's Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group and has undertaken fundamental research on automated bargaining, mechanism design, trust and reputation, coalition formation, human-agent collectives and crowd sourcing.

He has also pioneered the application of multi-agent technology; developing real-world systems in sectors such as business process management, smart energy systems, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, citizen science and defence. For example, the world’s first industrial deployment of multi-agent technology in the area of electricity transportation (with Iberdrola in Spain), environmental sensor network monitoring (Briksdalsbreen glacier -Norway) and engine manufacturing line control (Daimler-Chrysler, Germany).

Professor Jennings is also a successful entrepreneur and is Chief Scientific Officer for Aerogility, a 20 person start-up that develops advanced software solutions for the aerospace and defence sectors.

Professor Sir Christopher Snowden, University of Southampton Vice-Chancellor, said: “I am delighted that the unique contribution Nick has made through his research is being recognised with this prestigious honour.

“He richly deserves it for his personal achievements but it is also an honour for the University of Southampton.”

A copy of Professor Jennings’s CV, detailing his notable research achievements, publications, honours and external activities is available at: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/nrj/curriculum-vitae/