i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 23 February 2009

Previous Newsletters

Software Developers, Summer Placements at AWS

Active Web Solutions (AWS) is a dynamic local software development company based near Ipswich. AWS have two summer placement opportunities for Computing students from Essex University working as part of a team on various programming assignments. AWS has a variety of work ranging from Web development through to Intextra Package implementation through to bespoke development with Microsoft .NET (C Sharp) and SQL Server. Employees are expected to work with a variety of technologies, both developing new solutions and supporting and extending existing systems.

Candidates must be “all-rounders”; having an appreciation of the end to end solution delivery. A can-do attitude with ability to “think-on-your-feet” and willingness to become involved and try new challenges is important. We want people who enjoy computing and are passionate about programming. People who are excited by the technology and who are always willing to learn, take on new challenges and bring fresh ideas.

AWS is a modern company with a refreshing, no-nonsense approach to harnessing technology for the benefit of our customers. We seek likeminded individuals.

For more information about our projects and customers, see the company website. Applications: In the first instance, please send your CV and letter of application to lucy.pye@aws.net We expect to be interviewing later in March/April. These placements are ideally suited to students currently in their second year. For a report on the successful applicants from 2007, Will Allen and George Ward, click here.

AWR Donates Software to CSEE

AWR Corp has kindly donated 20 licences for use of its software to the School of Computer science and Electronic Engineering. AWR is a leader in in high-frequency EDA and provides a world-class comprehensive CAD package for high frequency design. It competes with Agilent ADS which the School already uses. It can be more intuitive to use than ADS. The donation is commercially worth around 1MUSD and will be supported for research use. The license is renewable on a yearly basis. If you wish to install the package please contact Dr Bob Self.

IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Agents

The 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Agents (IA 2009) will take place this year in Nashville, USA from the 30th of March till the 2nd of April 2009. Professor Hani Hagras acts as symposium Programme Chair
 
The symposium will address intersection between Computational Intelligence and Agent technology which will open new significant opportunities in many fields where the representation and management of complex systems play a fundamental role. In the formulation of Agent-based systems, the role of uncertainty is crucial for an efficient and coherent resolution of complex problems. Agents overcome classical programs thanks to their inner capabilities to be autonomous and to adapt their behaviour with the changing of the environment where agents live and interact. This means that inevitably they meet uncertainty during their work, or in many cases, for the high complexity of the problem, the information they handle is (or needs to be) approximate.
 
IA 2009 will aim to provide a leading international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from Industry and academia from diverse fields, such as computer science, information technology, business, education, human factors, systems engineering, and robotics. The symposium will aim to examine the design principles and performance characteristics of various approaches in intelligent agent technology. In addition, the symposium will aim to increase the cross-fertilization of ideas on the development of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems among different domains. By encouraging idea-sharing and discussions on the underlying logical, cognitive, physical, and sociological foundations as well as the enabling technologies of intelligent agents, IA 2009 will foster the development of novel paradigms and advanced solutions in agent-based computing.

Paper Accepted

Salem Said, Nicolas Le Bihan and Stephen Sangwine, ‘A stability approach to the analysis of rotation time series’, 15th IFAC Symposium on System Identification, SYSID 2009, Saint-Malo, France, 6–8 July 2009.

Computer Society News

4 March, 1.00 -2.00pm, Room 4N.2.3

Speaker: Bogdan Suvar (First Year student in BEng Computer Networks)

Privacy: what happens with our personal information?

Abstract - Companies and organisations are pushing for a new trend of sharing personal data online with the purpose of personalisation, identity verification or marketing information. Social networks encourage their users to provide a large amount of personal information when registering a profile, including political or religious views, complete address, phone numbers and other details so that they can use targeted marketing strategies. One might reasonably wonder why these companies show such high interest in our personal information and how safe is our personal information. Big companies like Google offer a large variety of free web services and applications, but in order to improve their search output and personalise their ads they use the data provided by the user: recording every query inserted, scanning e-mails. To do that they need to store cookies on our machines for a limited period of time. All the data is stored in databases, in the cloud.

In my presentation I address the issue of possibility of a database break and the viability of instances when private information goes public or becomes searchable.

Refreshments and freebies are provided.

Forthcoming Seminar

13 March 2009, 3.00 - 4.00pm, Room 1N1.4.1

Speaker: Dr. Martin Kuball, Bristol University (hosted by Professor Naci Balkan)

Temperature, Stress and Hot Phonons in GaN Electronics and its Interfaces

Abstract - GaN power electronics has great potential for future radar and communication applications. Huge advances in their performance have made this new material system superior to GaAs and Si in particular in terms of power performance. However, there are still large reliability challenges which need to be addressed, often related to high device temperature and large stresses in the devices. Those are very challenging to assess as these are present only in sub-micron device regions typically located near the gate of an HEMT. I report on our work of the development of Raman thermography, to assess temperature, stress as well as hot phonon effects in AlGaN/GaN but also GaAs pHEMTs to address reliability challenges in power electronics. The techniques developed enable temperature and stress measurement in devices with submicron spatial and nanosecond time resolution. Effects of thermal cross-talk, but also heat transfer across interfaces in the devices will be discussed, together with hot-phonon effects.