Ownership-based Alias Analysis for Securing Unsafe Rust Programs. This project aims to develop an ownership-based alias analysis as a complement to Rust's ownership type system for improving Rust's memory safety. This project, therefore, expects to deliver an alias analysis foundation that can provide stronger memory safety guarantees than the state-of-the-art in detecting memory-safety violations and security vulnerabilities in real-world Rust programs that use unsafe language features. The exp ....Ownership-based Alias Analysis for Securing Unsafe Rust Programs. This project aims to develop an ownership-based alias analysis as a complement to Rust's ownership type system for improving Rust's memory safety. This project, therefore, expects to deliver an alias analysis foundation that can provide stronger memory safety guarantees than the state-of-the-art in detecting memory-safety violations and security vulnerabilities in real-world Rust programs that use unsafe language features. The expected outcomes are a deployable ownership-based alias analysis in the Rust compiler and an industrial-strength open-source framework. These outcomes are expected to provide significant benefits in improving software quality and security in Rust, an emerging language that offers both performance and safety.Read moreRead less
Viewable Measures for Component-Based Software Engineering. Software costs over US$300 billion per year worldwide with around 70% of large projects failing to complete in time. Reliable estimation of development effort is a great challenge in Software Engineering. This project aims to develop a reliable multi-dimensional software size measure and an effort estimation model for a new method of development called component based software engineering. We will validate our results theoretically and ....Viewable Measures for Component-Based Software Engineering. Software costs over US$300 billion per year worldwide with around 70% of large projects failing to complete in time. Reliable estimation of development effort is a great challenge in Software Engineering. This project aims to develop a reliable multi-dimensional software size measure and an effort estimation model for a new method of development called component based software engineering. We will validate our results theoretically and test it against empirical data from software industry. We will provide novel visualization techniques to comprehend measurements of large systems. The outcomes will help software projects better estimate deadlines and budgets thus reducing costs significantly.Read moreRead less
A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based de ....A framework for modelling feature variability and dependencies in software product lines. In most Australian software development organisations software products are developed individually rather than product line based. This project will promote the awareness of product line based software development and provide a frontier technology, the effective feature modelling approaches, to help Australian software industry transform from the single product based development to the product line based development to achieve significant improvement on the productivity and the quality of the software development. This improvement will dramatically reduce the cost of software products and alleviate the pressure of skill shortage that currently threatens Australian economy.Read moreRead less
Intelligent Incident Management for Software-Intensive Systems. This project aims to develop intelligent incident management methods for software-intensive systems. Incidents are unplanned system interruptions or outages that could affect the normal operations of an organization and cause huge economic loss. This project expects to develop innovative, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based methods for automated incident management, including incident detection, incident identification, and incident ....Intelligent Incident Management for Software-Intensive Systems. This project aims to develop intelligent incident management methods for software-intensive systems. Incidents are unplanned system interruptions or outages that could affect the normal operations of an organization and cause huge economic loss. This project expects to develop innovative, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based methods for automated incident management, including incident detection, incident identification, and incident triage. Expected outcomes of the project include a set of novel methods and tools that can facilitate incident diagnosis and resolution. This project will provide significant benefits, such as improving the availability of software-intensive systems and reducing the economic loss caused by the incidents. 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
Provably Correct on-chip Communication-based Design. This project falls in the priority area of Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries. Embedded systems have complex communication architectures and functionalities due to their mission- and time-critical applications. This project will develop verifiable algorithms and techniques for design reuse to address them, help solve outstanding problems in the VLSI/SoC community and to lift the country's visibility and ....Provably Correct on-chip Communication-based Design. This project falls in the priority area of Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries. Embedded systems have complex communication architectures and functionalities due to their mission- and time-critical applications. This project will develop verifiable algorithms and techniques for design reuse to address them, help solve outstanding problems in the VLSI/SoC community and to lift the country's visibility and credibility in the area. The economic benefits are better techniques for design reuse for embedded systems that may be integrated into existing Computer Aided Design environments, with potential to commercialise the algorithms to Electronic Design Automation and vendors.Read moreRead less
Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the us ....Redesigning Typesetting for the Digital Age: Multilingual Layout on Multiple Media. We propose to create and develop a new model for character-level automatic typesetting, much more flexible than existing approaches. This model will support quality typesetting of all of the modern - and many ancient - languages and scripts, on media such as paper, computer screen, paper maps and online maps, for regular and safety-critical applications.
The fundamental innovations in this proposal are the use of a tree-structured parameter space (generalization of Unix environment variables) and a multiple-pass approach to typesetting (as used in compilers). These innovative techniques will be integrated into computer software used worldwide.Read moreRead less
Context-aware verification and validation framework for autonomous driving. This project aims to enhance the reliability and safety of emerging self-driving vehicles, through a framework that supports the validation and verification of autonomous driving systems. This project expects to generate new knowledge in areas of software engineering, intelligent transport, and machine learning, using a multi-disciplinary research combining expertise from various fields. Expected outcomes of this project ....Context-aware verification and validation framework for autonomous driving. This project aims to enhance the reliability and safety of emerging self-driving vehicles, through a framework that supports the validation and verification of autonomous driving systems. This project expects to generate new knowledge in areas of software engineering, intelligent transport, and machine learning, using a multi-disciplinary research combining expertise from various fields. Expected outcomes of this project are a family of new context-aware techniques to verify and validate complex behaviours in autonomous driving. This should provide significant benefits, such as safe autonomous driving systems and the improved journey experience and security for road users.Read moreRead less
Data-driven Approach to Resilient Online Service Systems. This project aims to develop a data-driven approach to improving the resilience of online service systems. Many software systems are now provided as online services via the Internet on a 24/7 basis. Although a lot of effort has been devoted to service quality assurance, in reality, online service systems still encounter many incidents and fail to satisfy user requests. This project expects to develop innovative data-driven methods for eff ....Data-driven Approach to Resilient Online Service Systems. This project aims to develop a data-driven approach to improving the resilience of online service systems. Many software systems are now provided as online services via the Internet on a 24/7 basis. Although a lot of effort has been devoted to service quality assurance, in reality, online service systems still encounter many incidents and fail to satisfy user requests. This project expects to develop innovative data-driven methods for effective fault identification, fault localization, and failure prediction. Expected outcomes of this project include novel techniques and tools for maintaining online service systems. This project will provide significant benefits, such as improving the resilience and reliability of our cyber infrastructure.Read moreRead less
Design-Driven Requirements for Internet-Enabled System Development. The nature of Web system development is significantly different from conventional, software and IT development. Amongst other factors, there is substantial uncertainty in both clients' understanding of their needs and developers' understanding of the systems domain. We will develop an uncertainty model relevant to the development model relevant to the development of internet-enabled systems, and then use this model to adapt th ....Design-Driven Requirements for Internet-Enabled System Development. The nature of Web system development is significantly different from conventional, software and IT development. Amongst other factors, there is substantial uncertainty in both clients' understanding of their needs and developers' understanding of the systems domain. We will develop an uncertainty model relevant to the development model relevant to the development of internet-enabled systems, and then use this model to adapt the design process to support elicitation of requirements, as well as developing support for this adapted process. This will facilitate the development of systems that more accurately reflect clients' needs, and result in an understanding of what would be involved in reducing development costs.Read moreRead less