Towards Generalisable and Unbiased Dynamic Recommender Systems. This project aims to develop the foundations, including models, methodology, and algorithms for building generalisable and unbiased dynamic recommender systems to facilitate intelligent decision-making, prompt contextualised and personalised strategic plans, and support context-aware action recourse. To ensure that fundamental principles, such as fairness and transparency, are respected, a set of algorithms and techniques are propos ....Towards Generalisable and Unbiased Dynamic Recommender Systems. This project aims to develop the foundations, including models, methodology, and algorithms for building generalisable and unbiased dynamic recommender systems to facilitate intelligent decision-making, prompt contextualised and personalised strategic plans, and support context-aware action recourse. To ensure that fundamental principles, such as fairness and transparency, are respected, a set of algorithms and techniques are proposed to develop recommender systems in a more responsible manner. The result of this project will not only maintain Australia's leadership in this frontier research area, but also serve as an excellent vehicle for the education and training of Australia's next generation of scholars and engineers.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
Rigorous Privacy Compliance in Modern Application Ecosystems. Modern network applications such as mobile applications and browser extensions have become the primary gateways for consumers to access the Internet in today’s digital landscape. This project aims to address privacy issues in these ecosystems by developing a new privacy-compliance assessment framework. The framework will evaluate the current privacy practices of application ecosystems, enabling users and developers in Australia and wo ....Rigorous Privacy Compliance in Modern Application Ecosystems. Modern network applications such as mobile applications and browser extensions have become the primary gateways for consumers to access the Internet in today’s digital landscape. This project aims to address privacy issues in these ecosystems by developing a new privacy-compliance assessment framework. The framework will evaluate the current privacy practices of application ecosystems, enabling users and developers in Australia and worldwide to reliably identify potential privacy risks and issues on their applications. The intended outcomes should endow data controllers with the capability of evidencing their compliance of data protection legislations such as Australia Privacy Act 1988 and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).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
Human-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle interactions: Making drones talk and listen. This project aims to develop audio technology to enable unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to hear, use speech and sound to communicate with humans, acoustically sense their surroundings and make them less noisy. This project expects to generate new knowledge in acoustic signal processing and its application in drones using innovative approaches, such as use of miniature microphone and loudspeaker arrays, and active noise ....Human-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle interactions: Making drones talk and listen. This project aims to develop audio technology to enable unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to hear, use speech and sound to communicate with humans, acoustically sense their surroundings and make them less noisy. This project expects to generate new knowledge in acoustic signal processing and its application in drones using innovative approaches, such as use of miniature microphone and loudspeaker arrays, and active noise control. Expected outcomes include development of new theories, Intellectual Property, with potential commercial value, and training of next generation researchers. This should provide significant benefits with applications in life saving, search and rescue operations, transportation of goods, and creation of 3D media.Read moreRead less
Uncertainty, Risk and Related Concepts in Machine Learning. Machine learning is the science of making sense of data. It does not and cannot remove all risk and uncertainty. This project proposes to study the foundations of how machine learning uses, represents and communicates risk and uncertainty. It aims to do so by finding new theoretical connections between diverse notions that have arisen in allied disciplines. These include risk, uncertainty, scoring rules and loss functions, divergences, ....Uncertainty, Risk and Related Concepts in Machine Learning. Machine learning is the science of making sense of data. It does not and cannot remove all risk and uncertainty. This project proposes to study the foundations of how machine learning uses, represents and communicates risk and uncertainty. It aims to do so by finding new theoretical connections between diverse notions that have arisen in allied disciplines. These include risk, uncertainty, scoring rules and loss functions, divergences, statistics and different ways of aggregating information. By building a more complete theoretical map it is expected that new machine learning methods will be developed, but more importantly that machine learning will be able to be better integrated into larger socio-technical systems.Read moreRead less
DeepHoney: Automatic Honey Data Generation for Active Cyber Defence . This project aims to enhance the security of networks and information systems by empowering them with intelligent deception techniques to achieve proactive attack detection and defence. In recent times, the fictitious environment – honeypot designed by human experience becomes popular to attract attackers and capture their interactions. However, rules-based construction of honeypots fails in preserving the privacy, boosting th ....DeepHoney: Automatic Honey Data Generation for Active Cyber Defence . This project aims to enhance the security of networks and information systems by empowering them with intelligent deception techniques to achieve proactive attack detection and defence. In recent times, the fictitious environment – honeypot designed by human experience becomes popular to attract attackers and capture their interactions. However, rules-based construction of honeypots fails in preserving the privacy, boosting the attractiveness and evolving the system. The project expects to advance deep learning and yield novel DeepHoney technologies with associated publications and open-source software. This should benefit science, society, and the economy by building the next generation of active cyber defence systems. Read moreRead less
Energy big data analytics from a cybersecurity perspective. This project aims to develop a framework on energy big data analytics from security and privacy perspectives. Unlike other big data analytics such as social network big data analytics, energy big data analytics involve research challenges on how to cope with real-time tight cyber-physical couplings, and security/safety of the smart grid system. This project will develop advanced data-driven algorithms that are capable of detecting coord ....Energy big data analytics from a cybersecurity perspective. This project aims to develop a framework on energy big data analytics from security and privacy perspectives. Unlike other big data analytics such as social network big data analytics, energy big data analytics involve research challenges on how to cope with real-time tight cyber-physical couplings, and security/safety of the smart grid system. This project will develop advanced data-driven algorithms that are capable of detecting coordinated cyber-attacks that will potentially lead to catastrophic cascaded failures; and develop new solutions in detecting the false data-injection attacks that are conventionally considered as unobservable. This project will provide the benefit of enhancing our national critical infrastructure's security.Read moreRead less
The growth of giant black holes in the early universe. This project aims to discover the largest black holes in the early universe and their origin, and weigh them using infrared spectroscopy. Giant black holes at the centres of galaxies reach masses over ten billion times that of our Sun. Astronomy has revealed the origin of black holes with masses similar to that of the Sun, but remains puzzled by the existence of those with masses many million times larger. This project will reveal pathways o ....The growth of giant black holes in the early universe. This project aims to discover the largest black holes in the early universe and their origin, and weigh them using infrared spectroscopy. Giant black holes at the centres of galaxies reach masses over ten billion times that of our Sun. Astronomy has revealed the origin of black holes with masses similar to that of the Sun, but remains puzzled by the existence of those with masses many million times larger. This project will reveal pathways of black-hole growth early after the Big Bang. The project will shed light on the evolution of galaxies in the early universe and prepare the ground for new work by other scientists, for example on the origin of the elements.Read moreRead less
Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor ....Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. However, the booming IoT applications and cloud computing require that the biometric authentication must be conducted in the privacy-protected setting in order to comply with privacy protection legal regulations. Latest reports show that current biometric authentication systems, under protected setting, exhibit poor authentication performance, which is not commercially applicable. This project aims to investigate innovative solutions to this issue. The intended deliverables will include deep learning based biometric feature extractor, cancellable biometrics and cloud oriented biometrics security protocols. Read moreRead less