Micro Virtual Machines: Abstraction, contained. This project will address a systemic source of inefficiency in widely used software which leads to many programs running as much as ten times slower and using considerably more energy than necessary, shortening battery life on mobile phones and increasing costs for large server farms. This inefficiency is endemic because it is due to the underlying languages rather than the particular software. This project will address this problem by developing a ....Micro Virtual Machines: Abstraction, contained. This project will address a systemic source of inefficiency in widely used software which leads to many programs running as much as ten times slower and using considerably more energy than necessary, shortening battery life on mobile phones and increasing costs for large server farms. This inefficiency is endemic because it is due to the underlying languages rather than the particular software. This project will address this problem by developing a high efficiency substrate, called a micro virtual machine, on which languages may be built.Read moreRead less
MemberGuard: Protecting Machine Learning Privacy from Membership Inference. Machine Learning has become a core part of many real-world applications. However, machine learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks. In these attacks, an adversary can infer if a given data record has been part of the model's training data. In this project, the team aims to develop new techniques that can be used to counter these attacks, such as 1) new analytical models for membership leakage, 2) ne ....MemberGuard: Protecting Machine Learning Privacy from Membership Inference. Machine Learning has become a core part of many real-world applications. However, machine learning models are vulnerable to membership inference attacks. In these attacks, an adversary can infer if a given data record has been part of the model's training data. In this project, the team aims to develop new techniques that can be used to counter these attacks, such as 1) new analytical models for membership leakage, 2) new methods for susceptibility diagnosis, 3) new defences that leverage privacy and utility. Data-oriented services are estimated to be valuable assets in the future. These techniques can help Australia gain cutting edge advantage in machine learning security and privacy and protect its intellectual property on these services.Read moreRead less
Finding and exploiting interesting paths in multidimensional information spaces. This project will invent a new approach for searching within a large complex information space, finding interesting paths between points within the space, visualising the results, and supporting rich, human-centric user interaction with queries and results. This project will embody these techniques in a novel, internet-scale framework to support rapid development of large path search and visualisation applications. ....Finding and exploiting interesting paths in multidimensional information spaces. This project will invent a new approach for searching within a large complex information space, finding interesting paths between points within the space, visualising the results, and supporting rich, human-centric user interaction with queries and results. This project will embody these techniques in a novel, internet-scale framework to support rapid development of large path search and visualisation applications. Evaluation will be via development of several exemplar applications. The techniques and framework will be applicable to a broad range of economically important problems in areas as diverse as health, travel, scientific publication search, product marketing and software engineering.Read moreRead less
Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage c ....Improving Modern Programming Language Performance: A Memory-Conscious Approach. The performance of modern programming languages such as Java and C# lags that of imperative languages such as C and Fortran. A significant source of the performance gap is poor memory behavior, which future computer architectures will exacerbate. This project addresses the problem of poor memory behavior in modern programming languages such as Java and C# through an integrated attack that incorporates new garbage collection algorithms, run-time techniques that optimize running programs, and new compiler analyses with both static and dynamic optimizations. The project will give Australia an
international presence in a research area of great academic and commercial importance.
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User-task co-adaptation for effective interactive simulation environments. This project aims to deliver smart interactive simulation environments in which users and simulation tasks work together. This project aims to create novel adaptive algorithms to automatically discover those user and task features that vary together to smartly adapt users and simulation tasks to work together harmoniously, seamlessly and effectively. Interactive simulation environments are the backbone for evaluating conc ....User-task co-adaptation for effective interactive simulation environments. This project aims to deliver smart interactive simulation environments in which users and simulation tasks work together. This project aims to create novel adaptive algorithms to automatically discover those user and task features that vary together to smartly adapt users and simulation tasks to work together harmoniously, seamlessly and effectively. Interactive simulation environments are the backbone for evaluating concepts, designs, products and advanced training systems in industry and government organisations. By bringing the user naturally inside the simulation as a task's component, users can improve their experience while task performance is simultaneously optimised. Intended outcomes include novel dynamic user-task profiling algorithms and new adaptive algorithms for user-task co-adaptation. Practical outcomes may include robust and highly effective simulation environments.Read moreRead less
Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an ....Learning to Pinpoint Emerging Software Vulnerabilities. This project aims to develop learning-based software vulnerability detection techniques to improve the reliability and security of modern software systems. The existing techniques relying on conventional yet rigid software analysis and testing techniques are ineffective and/or inefficient when detecting a wide variety of emerging software vulnerabilities. The outcomes of this project will be a deep-learning-based detection approach and an open-source tool that can capture precision correlations between deep code features and diverse vulnerabilities to pinpoint emerging vulnerabilities without the need for bug specifications. Significant benefits include greatly improved quality, reliability and security for modern software systems.Read moreRead less
Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while pres ....Privacy-preserving data processing on the cloud. This project aims to address the current lack of privacy of user data processed by common cloud computing web servers, including email, business data, and confidential files. This project aims to develop new techniques in cryptography. The anticipated outcome is a suite of practical tools enabling common cloud computing processing operations such as search, statistical analysis, and multi-user access control, to be performed efficiently while preserving the data privacy. These tools should provide significant benefits to the privacy of cloud users, as well as financial and reputation benefits to the IT industry, by significantly reducing the likelihood of massive user data privacy breaches in the event of a cyber-hacking attack on the cloud server.Read moreRead less
Next generation garbage collection: discovery, design, and development. This project aims to improve the performance of programming languages used by millions of Australians every day, such as Java, JavaScript and PHP by developing improved memory-management algorithms. These languages use what is referred to as “garbage collection” to ensure memory is managed without data loss, but do so conservatively and consequently cause performance challenges and energy overheads. This project expects to p ....Next generation garbage collection: discovery, design, and development. This project aims to improve the performance of programming languages used by millions of Australians every day, such as Java, JavaScript and PHP by developing improved memory-management algorithms. These languages use what is referred to as “garbage collection” to ensure memory is managed without data loss, but do so conservatively and consequently cause performance challenges and energy overheads. This project expects to provide these languages with improved memory-management algorithms, and provides researchers and industry with a framework for innovation. This project will enable safe software that is more efficient on today's hardware and able to exploit emerging hardware. This project should lead to better performance and energy savings for server applications, phones, watches, and smart appliances, while ensuring memory safety.Read moreRead less
Towards High-performance and Fault-tolerant Distributed Java Implementations. Java Virtual Machines form an important part of the web and business
server market. Distributed Java Virtual Machines have the potential to
make a significant contribution to industries that utilize this
technology. An attractive platform for this purpose is the
cluster, a highly cost-effective and scalable parallel computer
model. However, realizing on such a platform a high performance virtual
machine implem ....Towards High-performance and Fault-tolerant Distributed Java Implementations. Java Virtual Machines form an important part of the web and business
server market. Distributed Java Virtual Machines have the potential to
make a significant contribution to industries that utilize this
technology. An attractive platform for this purpose is the
cluster, a highly cost-effective and scalable parallel computer
model. However, realizing on such a platform a high performance virtual
machine implementation tolerant to hardware and software faults, and
having efficient memory utilization, presents many challenging research
issues. This project will address these issues by extending a highly
efficient and extensible Java implementation to be aware of its cluster
environment.
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Lightweight security solutions for wearable healthcare sensor devices. The aim of this project is to develop new methods to secure the data and context associated with body-wearable health monitoring devices. The novelty of the scheme is in making the methods work on resource-poor devices, by combining new security capabilities derived from the operating environment with conventional cryptographic techniques. This project aims to increase the trust that medical practitioners and insurance provid ....Lightweight security solutions for wearable healthcare sensor devices. The aim of this project is to develop new methods to secure the data and context associated with body-wearable health monitoring devices. The novelty of the scheme is in making the methods work on resource-poor devices, by combining new security capabilities derived from the operating environment with conventional cryptographic techniques. This project aims to increase the trust that medical practitioners and insurance providers can place on health data from wearable devices, and showcase Australian innovation in developing world-class security solutions. The outcome of this project is expected to be the development and demonstration of ultra-lightweight algorithms and mechanisms that execute in wearable devices to safeguard the integrity of the data.Read moreRead less