The University of Southampton
The University of Southampton's origins date from 1862, and it was granted its Charter as a University in 1952. It is now regarded as one the UK's top ten research universities with a reputation for excellence that extends across all its subject areas. The University has 20 academic schools and three major research institutes. It is a member of the Russell Group of research universities and a founder member of the Worldwide Universities Network. It has 20,000 students and 5,000 members of staff, based at its seven major campuses in Southampton and Winchester, and its annual turnover is £270 million. Southampton is the UK's premier engineering university and it is also particularly known for research in maritime subjects. In recent years the University has been particularly successful in enterprise activities, particularly in the area of photonics, and mergers and new initiatives have expanded its academic base over recent years, bringing new opportunities for teaching and research.
The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton is the largest and most successful university department of its kind in the UK. The School has an unrivalled reputation for its research and teaching, and it has research collaborations and partnerships with leading companies and agencies worldwide. The School is rated 'very best 5*' on the basis of its performance in the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise, and it has received the highest grades for its teaching quality. The School has around 230 faculty and research staff, and around 200 postgraduate research students. It has over 1000 undergraduate and Masters students. Its annual turnover is around £25 million. The School's research activities are carried out within ten active research groups: BIO@ECS; Communications; Declarative Systems and Software Engineering; Electrical Power Engineering; Electronic Systems Design; Grid and Pervasive Computing; Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems; Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia; Learning Technologies; Nanoscale Systems Integration. The Department recently identified Semantic Web and Agent-Based computing as a new strategic direction for research and has developed large Semantic Web and Agent technology groups with related interests in knowledge technologies, pervasive computing and other areas.
The Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Group, in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton is a world leader in the three major themes that converge in its tripartite title: Intelligence - examining the fundamental principals of intelligent and adaptive behaviour, and developing methodologies for acquiring, modelling, reusing, retrieving, publishing and maintaining knowledge; Agents - devising new methods and models for inter-agent interactions such as co-operation, co-ordination and negotiation, describing, locating, and utilising semantically annotated agent-capability descriptions, and agent-oriented software engineering; and finally Multimedia - investigating the basic principals and applications of multimedia, hypermedia and document management, in large scale, open systems such as digital libraries and eScience environments. It has an excellent track record in developing methodologies for acquiring, modelling, reusing, retrieving, publishing and maintaining knowledge, which led to SOTON winning the Semantic Web challenge in 2003.
These three research themes also combine synergistically in a number of grand challenges for computer science - including grid computing, the Semantic Web, and pervasive computing environments. All of these domains can be classified as large-scale, open distributed systems in which entities (both people and software) representing different stakeholders, act and interact in flexible and personalised ways to achieve their individual and collective goals. This synergy allows the IAM group to focus on problems from diverse, yet related perspectives, and enables smaller projects to utilise and contribute towards resources generated by the larger efforts.
Some recent and larger ongoing projects include the EU funded AgentLink III Coordination Action, two leading 6 year UK IRC projects - AKT and EQUATOR, as well as other large Grid and Semantic Web related projects including CoAKTing, Comb-e-chem, CONOISE-G, Geodise, MiAKT, MobieVCE, myGrid, Passoa, and Sculpteur. The IAM group currently has 95 PhD students and holds research funding grants of €17.6 million. The academic staff comprises of 20 faculty, of which 8 are Professors (including such notables as Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, director of W3C, and Professor Wendy Hall, Head of the British Computer Society).
Contacts
Terry Payne - (email address)
Role in the project
SOTON’s role in TAO will be to lead the work on the SWS bootstrapping methodology and the development of distributed knowledge repositories, the TAO infrastructure, and standardisation and dissemination activities.
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