Ultimately Trusted Security through Human-Powered Cryptography. Cryptography offers wonderful tools for unbreakable data security, but only between computer nodes, leaving their human owners helpless. Encrypted tunnels terminate not at humans but at mobile phones and personal computers, exposing users' secrets to spyware from search-engine keyloggers to full-bore malware planted by crooks, hackers, and foreign spy agencies. This project aims to create a simple and strong cryptography, so that hu ....Ultimately Trusted Security through Human-Powered Cryptography. Cryptography offers wonderful tools for unbreakable data security, but only between computer nodes, leaving their human owners helpless. Encrypted tunnels terminate not at humans but at mobile phones and personal computers, exposing users' secrets to spyware from search-engine keyloggers to full-bore malware planted by crooks, hackers, and foreign spy agencies. This project aims to create a simple and strong cryptography, so that humans can, for the first time, take front seat in real security protocols. The technical challenge is to build public-key ciphers, operable manually from a mental key in seconds, and from there remake human-powered versions of many useful information security protocols.Read moreRead less
Relaxed correctness criteria for modern multi-core architectures. This project seeks to lay groundwork for fully exploiting the potential of multicore computers. Multicore computers have become ubiquitous over the last decade, now being standard in everything from laptops to mobile phones. Their benefits are clear – better performance leading to more sophisticated applications. Key to ensuring those benefits are complex, and often subtle, algorithms that exploit the parallelism that multicore co ....Relaxed correctness criteria for modern multi-core architectures. This project seeks to lay groundwork for fully exploiting the potential of multicore computers. Multicore computers have become ubiquitous over the last decade, now being standard in everything from laptops to mobile phones. Their benefits are clear – better performance leading to more sophisticated applications. Key to ensuring those benefits are complex, and often subtle, algorithms that exploit the parallelism that multicore computers offer. This project aims to lay foundations for extending those benefits to applications where high reliability is a concern. It plans to do so by developing theoretical results about the correctness of algorithms on standard multicore computers, and practical tools and techniques to help programmers of multicore computers to better understand the behaviour of their code.Read moreRead less
Towards the prime power conjecture. This project attacks a famous and long standing conjecture in pure mathematics that has important ramifications in many applied areas. The project aims to determine when it is possible to produce more efficient codes for electronic communication and statistically balanced designs for experiments in areas as diverse as agriculture and psychology.
Virtual transport networks. This project will develop specialised time-dependent networks for use in algorithmic software testing and development, focussing on public transportation networks, but applicable elsewhere. The virtual transport networks developed in this project will significantly reduce the cost of producing software products that perform network searches.