Internet Timing for the Ages: Establishing the New Timekeeping System. All computers incorporate a software clock, essential to myriad software applications. An economic way to synchronize such clocks is over a network, however the approach the Internet currently depends upon is unreliable and vulnerable. This project aims to establish a new architecture for networked timekeeping, built on future-proofed fundamentals, that will for the first time address each of accuracy, reliability, and trust. ....Internet Timing for the Ages: Establishing the New Timekeeping System. All computers incorporate a software clock, essential to myriad software applications. An economic way to synchronize such clocks is over a network, however the approach the Internet currently depends upon is unreliable and vulnerable. This project aims to establish a new architecture for networked timekeeping, built on future-proofed fundamentals, that will for the first time address each of accuracy, reliability, and trust. The expected outcome is a national prototype, serving the public with accurate and trusted time, that will form the basis of the next generation timekeeping system for the Internet and the Internet of Things. Expected benefits include enhanced productivity across the digital economy, and resilience to GPS failures.Read moreRead less
Attribution of Machine-generated Code for Accountability. Machine-generated (or neural) code is usually produced by AI tools to speed up software development. However, such codes have recently raised serious security and privacy concerns. This project aims to attribute these codes to their generative models for accountability purposes. In the process, a series of new techniques are developed to differentiate between the codes generated by different models. The outcomes include analysis of neural ....Attribution of Machine-generated Code for Accountability. Machine-generated (or neural) code is usually produced by AI tools to speed up software development. However, such codes have recently raised serious security and privacy concerns. This project aims to attribute these codes to their generative models for accountability purposes. In the process, a series of new techniques are developed to differentiate between the codes generated by different models. The outcomes include analysis of neural code fingerprints, classification of neural codes, and theories to verify the correctness of code attribution. These will provide significant benefits, ranging from copyright protection to privacy preservation. This project is timely since currently the software community is pervasively using neural codes.Read moreRead less
Optimising service level agreements for performance and energy efficiency in cloud computing systems. In cloud platforms a large number of applications compete for shared resources. Concerns of power consumption have become increasingly significant in the context of the design and use of cloud systems. In this project new algorithms and software tools will be developed to enable a better utilisation of clouds whilst minimising energy usage.
Resource Allocation for High-Volume Streaming Data in Data Centers. Almost all chip vendors are producing new hardware accelerators by combining several units into a single main-board, and therefore making the execution of parallel and distributed run-time primitives not efficient/scalable. This project aims to develop innovative ways to building incremental and iterative computations over massive data sets in a cluster of heterogeneous systems. This will provide a significant reduction of perfo ....Resource Allocation for High-Volume Streaming Data in Data Centers. Almost all chip vendors are producing new hardware accelerators by combining several units into a single main-board, and therefore making the execution of parallel and distributed run-time primitives not efficient/scalable. This project aims to develop innovative ways to building incremental and iterative computations over massive data sets in a cluster of heterogeneous systems. This will provide a significant reduction of performance bottlenecks when running heavily distributed data-driven applications. Expected outcomes will include resource management algorithms that optimise performance at large scale. The project will benefit many areas, including running stateful iterative stream-based data-analysis applications in data centres. Read moreRead less
Software-defined provisioning of Internet of Things applications in fog computing systems. This project aims to investigate and provide solutions for the realisation of a seemingly integrated Fog Computing (FC) paradigm with cloud environments, networking devices and Internet of Things devices. Fog Computing (FC) is an emerging paradigm with great promises for advancing Information and Communications Technologies. Using interdisciplinary approaches, the project expects to generate new knowledge ....Software-defined provisioning of Internet of Things applications in fog computing systems. This project aims to investigate and provide solutions for the realisation of a seemingly integrated Fog Computing (FC) paradigm with cloud environments, networking devices and Internet of Things devices. Fog Computing (FC) is an emerging paradigm with great promises for advancing Information and Communications Technologies. Using interdisciplinary approaches, the project expects to generate new knowledge for optimising both hardware and software resources of a FC system. Outcomes of this project include practical solutions through building novel mathematical frameworks and optimisation objectives. The project is expected to provide efficient monitoring and control of intelligent spaces, management of urban and rural environments and will have applications in the areas of energy, security, transport and public health.Read moreRead less
Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning for Secure and Decentralised Learning. This project aims to develop novel blockchain-enabled federated learning techniques for secure and decentralised learning. It addresses an important and urgent machine learning problem, that is, the data useful for training machine learning models are often held by different owners who are not willing to share their data due to privacy concerns, resulting in isolated data islands. The project will result in a set of inn ....Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning for Secure and Decentralised Learning. This project aims to develop novel blockchain-enabled federated learning techniques for secure and decentralised learning. It addresses an important and urgent machine learning problem, that is, the data useful for training machine learning models are often held by different owners who are not willing to share their data due to privacy concerns, resulting in isolated data islands. The project will result in a set of innovative algorithms that provide solutions to the key challenges in blockchain-enabled federated learning. The expected outcomes of the project will dramatically advance the frontier of machine learning and blockchain research, and have massive social and economic benefits for Australia and international communities.Read moreRead less
Algorithms and Software Systems for Management of Software-Defined Clouds. This project seeks to develop technologies for more powerful and lower-cost cloud computing. Cloud computing offers utility-oriented information technology services to users worldwide. Based on pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific and business domains. However, applications are unable to harness the full power of the cloud due to partial virtualisation and lack of int ....Algorithms and Software Systems for Management of Software-Defined Clouds. This project seeks to develop technologies for more powerful and lower-cost cloud computing. Cloud computing offers utility-oriented information technology services to users worldwide. Based on pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications from consumer, scientific and business domains. However, applications are unable to harness the full power of the cloud due to partial virtualisation and lack of integrated management of compute and network resources of data centres. This project aims to transform cloud computing by developing architectural principles for software-defined clouds; algorithms and policies for integrated allocation of compute and network resources to meet quality-of-service requirements of applications; and a novel software technology for energy-efficient management of software-defined clouds.Read moreRead less
Sublinear algorithms for visual analytics of extreme-scale networks. This project aims to design new sublinear algorithms for the visual analytics of extreme-scale networks, involving billions of nodes. Based on algorithmics for graph drawing, integrating sublinear algorithms and distributed algorithms, the project will introduce new quality metrics for good visualisation of extreme-scale networks, design new sublinear-time algorithms to compute good visualisation, implement them in a distribute ....Sublinear algorithms for visual analytics of extreme-scale networks. This project aims to design new sublinear algorithms for the visual analytics of extreme-scale networks, involving billions of nodes. Based on algorithmics for graph drawing, integrating sublinear algorithms and distributed algorithms, the project will introduce new quality metrics for good visualisation of extreme-scale networks, design new sublinear-time algorithms to compute good visualisation, implement them in a distributed computing environment, and evaluate with a real world social network and biological network data sets. The new algorithms produced by this project will be used in the next generation visual analytic tools for extreme-scale data to enable analysts develop new insights and new knowledge of extreme-scale data.Read moreRead less
Taipan: a block-chain with democratic consensus and validated contracts. Blockchains keep records by mass collaboration using peer-to-peer and cryptographical algorithms. Programmable blockchain technology can disrupt the finance industry, governance, and legal services by reducing the role for intermediaries such as banks and government authorities. This project aims to propose a new block-chain for “Trust Among Individual ParticipANts” (TAIPAN). The main feature of TAIPAN’s programmable block ....Taipan: a block-chain with democratic consensus and validated contracts. Blockchains keep records by mass collaboration using peer-to-peer and cryptographical algorithms. Programmable blockchain technology can disrupt the finance industry, governance, and legal services by reducing the role for intermediaries such as banks and government authorities. This project aims to propose a new block-chain for “Trust Among Individual ParticipANts” (TAIPAN). The main feature of TAIPAN’s programmable block-chain is the integrity and security of individual ownership records that current block-chains lack. This project will aim to overcome two major threats in current programmable block-chains, double-spending among participants, and security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. TAIPAN will provide a democratic and leaderless consensus algorithm that will avoid double-spending, and a new bug-checking framework for smart contracts that finds anomalies before smart contracts are admitted to the block-chain.Read moreRead less
Cost-effective App Service Management in Edge Computing Environment. This project aims to deliver a framework and a suite of approaches for cost-effective app service management in the edge computing (EC) environment facilitated by the 5G mobile network. Edge computing offers great promises for rapidly advancing mobile and IoT apps in many active domains in Australia, e.g., self-driving cars, medical services, etc. Using a variety of optimization techniques and game theory, this project attacks ....Cost-effective App Service Management in Edge Computing Environment. This project aims to deliver a framework and a suite of approaches for cost-effective app service management in the edge computing (EC) environment facilitated by the 5G mobile network. Edge computing offers great promises for rapidly advancing mobile and IoT apps in many active domains in Australia, e.g., self-driving cars, medical services, etc. Using a variety of optimization techniques and game theory, this project attacks the new challenges in the deployment, delivery and adaptation of app services in the EC environment. The outcomes of this project will significantly promote new mobile and IoT apps over Australia's 5G mobile network by allowing app vendors to manage their services cost-effectively with ease in the EC environment.Read moreRead less