Accurate analysis of combinatorial problems: from the particular to the general. Combinatorial problems pervade all aspects of our social, environmental and economic life, but finding good solutions to these problems can take too much computer time. This project will develop new analysis tools that are effective at reducing this time, thus allowing for better solutions to be found.
Learning from learning solvers. Finding optimum solutions to everyday problems is one of the most common challenges in decision making. This project aims to design and implement effective analysis and transformation methods to improve models of combinatorial optimisation problems. Better models will enable more scalable and robust deployment of resources in all these areas, and do so immediately and at low risk and cost. The results will help users design better models while spending less time a ....Learning from learning solvers. Finding optimum solutions to everyday problems is one of the most common challenges in decision making. This project aims to design and implement effective analysis and transformation methods to improve models of combinatorial optimisation problems. Better models will enable more scalable and robust deployment of resources in all these areas, and do so immediately and at low risk and cost. The results will help users design better models while spending less time and money. This will in turn allow organisations large and small to reap the benefits of optimisation technology and, thus, make more efficient use of their resources.Read moreRead less
Reasoning about Rational Agents from a Programming Languages Perspective. Rational agents are complex system components inspired by models of rationality, in which beliefs, desires and intentions are represented explicitly. Intelligent agents are fast becoming mainstream and have wide-ranging industrial application. However, a serious obstacle to the deployment of rational agents is a lack of understanding of how to design and reason about agents to provide performance and correctness guarantees ....Reasoning about Rational Agents from a Programming Languages Perspective. Rational agents are complex system components inspired by models of rationality, in which beliefs, desires and intentions are represented explicitly. Intelligent agents are fast becoming mainstream and have wide-ranging industrial application. However, a serious obstacle to the deployment of rational agents is a lack of understanding of how to design and reason about agents to provide performance and correctness guarantees. This project will investigate extensions to intelligent agent architectures and develop tools for reasoning about complex systems built using those architectures. This will not only enable reliable prediction of performance, but contribute to a general methodology for intelligent agent design.
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Applying the Lessons of the Virtual Battlefield to Financial Modelling - Investigating Innovative use of Distributed Simulation. The development of Distributed Simulations is recognised as an increasingly important part of training, scientific modelling and acquisitions in the defense community. While the benefits of simulation are well understood the actual development costs and complexity remain prohibitive, requiring expert programming skills and training. These limitations are greatly impedi ....Applying the Lessons of the Virtual Battlefield to Financial Modelling - Investigating Innovative use of Distributed Simulation. The development of Distributed Simulations is recognised as an increasingly important part of training, scientific modelling and acquisitions in the defense community. While the benefits of simulation are well understood the actual development costs and complexity remain prohibitive, requiring expert programming skills and training. These limitations are greatly impeding the wider adoption of simulation in the broader business community.
To address these issues this proposal investigates the means of applying simulation technologies to a domain in which user-configurable desktop tools, such as spreadsheets and word processors, are more the norm - for example financial modelling.
We aim to extend the development of tools and techniques that support the desktop use of simulation and to assess the relative merits of these approaches. Our eventual goal is to provide approachable simulation services, without adversely compromising their inherent power, to a far wider range of application domains.
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Towards automated and intelligent processing of web-based information. The successful outcome of this project will enhance Australia's research reputation in an important, practical area of ICT, will contribute to emerging Web standards, will produce frontier technology that will eventually be of benefit to Australian industry, and will train several postgraduate students.
Rule-based reasoning systems for complex and dynamic ontologies. The successful outcome of this project will enhance Australia's research reputation in an important, practical area of ICT, will contribute to emerging Web technologies that will eventually be of benefit to Australian industry, and will train several postgraduate students.
Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a unive ....Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a universal data structure, which unfortunately makes it hard to separate trusted code from untrusted user-provided data. This project intends to develop novel program analysis tools and string constraint solvers, and employ these tools to support sophisticated automated reasoning about string manipulating software.Read moreRead less
Processing large data sets on commodity data-parallel hardware. The project aims to reduce the costs of software development by improving the accessibility of massively data-parallel processors, termed graphics processing units (GPUs). The project seeks to develop a high-level programming system with data streaming support targeting GPUs and multi-GPU architectures. This would facilitate the difficult task of developing parallel applications for high-performance computing architectures. The comb ....Processing large data sets on commodity data-parallel hardware. The project aims to reduce the costs of software development by improving the accessibility of massively data-parallel processors, termed graphics processing units (GPUs). The project seeks to develop a high-level programming system with data streaming support targeting GPUs and multi-GPU architectures. This would facilitate the difficult task of developing parallel applications for high-performance computing architectures. The combination of parallelism and data streaming is designed to enable efficient processing of data too big to be held in device memory, which is a common problem in scientific computing, data analysis and machine learning. The project plans to integrate data streaming into an existing system, currently targeting single GPU architectures and which is successfully used in both industry and research.Read moreRead less
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
Improving the integrity of complex software systems. Software systems are among the most complex artifacts created today. The problems of reliability and maintenance of complex software systems are well-known. Improving reliability and lowering production cost continues to be an important challenge. The aim of this project is to create software development tools that allow programmers to express more of their intentions about program behaviour, in a way which can be automatically checked, in ord ....Improving the integrity of complex software systems. Software systems are among the most complex artifacts created today. The problems of reliability and maintenance of complex software systems are well-known. Improving reliability and lowering production cost continues to be an important challenge. The aim of this project is to create software development tools that allow programmers to express more of their intentions about program behaviour, in a way which can be automatically checked, in order to find discrepancies between intended and actual behaviour. This will facilitate the construction of software that is more secure, reliable, maintainable and reusable, that is, improve the integrity of complex software systems.
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