Ubiquitous and Pervasive Commerce edited by George Roussos has recently been published by Springer.

Welcome to all the staff, researchers and students who have joined us at the start of the new academic year. We are please to welcome two new lecturers, Dr Sven Helmer and Dr Giovanna di Marzo Serugendo. A warm welcome to Professor Michael Zakharyaschev who has joined us from King's College. Dr Roman Kontchakov and Dr Mikhail Sheremet will also be joining us as Research Associates working with Prof Zakharyaschev. Two new faces at Emerald Street - Dr Alexandre Guitton (Research Assistant) and Mr Adonis Skordilis (PhD student) will be working with Niki Trigoni on the TIME-EACM project mentioned below. Last but not least, Ming Tso (Mark) Chiang, Chunhua (Jenny) Hu and Zhu Zheng have recently started their PhD studies with us.

Sara de Freitas has won a BAIT Award (Birkbeck Award In Teaching) for her role in developing the PLATO module (Planning Learning And Teaching Online).

We are please to welcome Dr Dell Zhang who joined the department on 1st September as a Lecturer.

A new book by Prof Mark Levene entitled "An Introduction to Search Engines and Web Navigation" has been published by Pearson Education. Full details.

Steve Maybank have been appointed a member of the Academic Committee of State Key Laboratory for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, with effect form April 2005. A delegation from Huazhong University visited Birkbeck College on 3 May 2005 to present him with a certificate.

Ian Harrison is Birkbeck's representative on the eDIPED project which aims to provide a digital appraisal tool for the collection and presentation of portfolio evidence of European educators' competencies.

A new book by Prof Boris Mirkin entitled "Clustering for Data Mining - A Data Recovery Approach" has been published by Chapman & Hall. Full details are here.

George Magoulas, Alex Poulovassilis, Sara de Freitas and Ian Harrison have been awarded £132,000 from JISC for a project entitled: L4All: Lifelong learning in London for all as part of the Distributed e-Learning Programme.

Niki Trigoni has been awarded £207,830 from EPSRC for a project entitled: A Transport Information Monitoring Environment (TIME): Event Architecture and Context Management (TIME-EACM)