Virtual Environments for Improved Enterprise Software Deployment. This project aims to improve quality assurance for enterprise IT. Enterprise IT systems are highly interconnected and interdependent — a failure in one system can cause a cascade of failures across multiple systems, bringing business to a standstill. The project aims to create new technologies to automate the provisioning of virtual deployment environments to test the enterprise systems. In particular, it aims to develop new metho ....Virtual Environments for Improved Enterprise Software Deployment. This project aims to improve quality assurance for enterprise IT. Enterprise IT systems are highly interconnected and interdependent — a failure in one system can cause a cascade of failures across multiple systems, bringing business to a standstill. The project aims to create new technologies to automate the provisioning of virtual deployment environments to test the enterprise systems. In particular, it aims to develop new methods for the automatic analysis of service interaction traces and the generation of accurate executable service models, without requiring explicit knowledge of them. The automatic analysis and generation should reduce development cost for enterprise IT systems and increase system quality and reliability. The new software deployment technologies from this project aim to significantly reduce the time, effort and cost of system quality assurance activities in software development organisations, and yet produce higher-quality software leading to uninterrupted business operation in end-user organisations across all sectors.Read moreRead less
e-Hermes: Context-rich mobile agent technologies to support information needs of financial institutions. How do we achieve flexibility and efficiency of financial services in electronic commerce environment using mobile software agents? To address this question the project will extend a system architecture based on mobile agents, which retrieve, pre-process and deliver relevant information to potentially mobile users. Two major components - information processor and agent mission processor - wil ....e-Hermes: Context-rich mobile agent technologies to support information needs of financial institutions. How do we achieve flexibility and efficiency of financial services in electronic commerce environment using mobile software agents? To address this question the project will extend a system architecture based on mobile agents, which retrieve, pre-process and deliver relevant information to potentially mobile users. Two major components - information processor and agent mission processor - will be researched and developed by two PhD scholars to be supported by this application. The project results could be commercialised by the industry partner. The project is innovative in that it considers the emerging agent paradigm as an integrated distributed system in the e-commerce environment.Read moreRead less
Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools ....Achieving Tailored Industrial Software Process Improvement with Experience Repositories and Electronic Process Guides. There is a well-recognised need for organisations to improve their software development processes in order to achieve higher software quality and greater efficiencies in development. The use of electronic process guides and experience repositories have been two technologies independently proposed to achieve these aims. This research will develop a framework, methods and tools to allow integration of experience repositories and electronic process guides to facilitate process tailoring, process improvement, and project management. The result will be significant improvements in software development productivity and quality.Read moreRead less
Formal Context Analysis in Rapidly Evolving Knowledge Webs (4CARE-K). On-the-fly personalised assembly of complex objects (learning
materials, contracts, plans, designs, software configurations, etc)
is increasingly expected in knowledge processing and decision
making. This requires the discovery of discrete underlying models and
taxonomies of subject domains and statistical matching in dynamically
varying contexts defined by changing personal preferences, tasks,
objectives and other chara ....Formal Context Analysis in Rapidly Evolving Knowledge Webs (4CARE-K). On-the-fly personalised assembly of complex objects (learning
materials, contracts, plans, designs, software configurations, etc)
is increasingly expected in knowledge processing and decision
making. This requires the discovery of discrete underlying models and
taxonomies of subject domains and statistical matching in dynamically
varying contexts defined by changing personal preferences, tasks,
objectives and other characteristics. This project addresses formal
models of context and similarity based in applied lattice theory
(formal concepts), feature logic and statistical retrieval. Parallel
algorithms will be developed, analysed and benchmarked to enable
high-performance processing of vast numbers of heterogeneous objects
in a distributed knowledge web.Read moreRead less
Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This pr ....Secure user authentication with continuous adaptive risk evaluation. Users typically authenticate to any given system only once - when they first access it (for example, through providing a password or fingerprint). The prevalence of single sign-on further allows this single authentication to be sufficient for access to multiple systems. Thus an adversary can obtain a large degree of access from stealing a single password, hijacking a user's session, or even simply borrowing their phone. This project aims to develop a continuous authentication approach based on user behaviour - typical interactions plus biometrics (for example, keystroke dynamics) - combined with a risk adaptive assessment of the resources being accessed, resulting in re-authentication requests in the event of a suspected compromise.Read moreRead less
Service orientated architectures in management of IT infrastructures. Through the utilisation of the proposed framework for building rich business service registries, Australian companies will be able to take full advantage of service oriented architectures in constructing and managing their IT infrastructure in a way that is not currently possible. Such a registry will be able to provide a coherent view of an enterprise's services and resources, and an effective way to co-relate and utilise the ....Service orientated architectures in management of IT infrastructures. Through the utilisation of the proposed framework for building rich business service registries, Australian companies will be able to take full advantage of service oriented architectures in constructing and managing their IT infrastructure in a way that is not currently possible. Such a registry will be able to provide a coherent view of an enterprise's services and resources, and an effective way to co-relate and utilise them, in a changing environment. The development of the framework will also further cement Australia's leading market position in providing service registries to enterprises world-wide, enhance Australia's international research reputation and provide an excellent training environment for young researchers.Read moreRead less
Effective software process improvement in a large-scale defence contracting environment. Most organisations struggle to consistently develop high-quality software on schedule and within budget. Continuing changes in technologies and customer expectations complicate this challenge. Software process improvement frameworks aim to guide organisations towards best practice. This project will assess practical experience with individual software process improvement frameworks in a large-scale defence c ....Effective software process improvement in a large-scale defence contracting environment. Most organisations struggle to consistently develop high-quality software on schedule and within budget. Continuing changes in technologies and customer expectations complicate this challenge. Software process improvement frameworks aim to guide organisations towards best practice. This project will assess practical experience with individual software process improvement frameworks in a large-scale defence contracting environment, with the goal of developing an effective strategy for integrating them. The outcomes will include documented experience with specific process improvement frameworks and a strategy for an overall framework that combines them.Read moreRead less
Agent-Based Simulation - New Approaches for Design and Prototyping. The project will improve the capacity of Australian companies to bring products to market more quickly where there are complex trade-offs between interacting actors. The simulation guidelines will help understand interaction in complex systems and the identification of important factors in the air traffic domain. The research will also preserve the leading position of Australian technology for high quality simulations of air tra ....Agent-Based Simulation - New Approaches for Design and Prototyping. The project will improve the capacity of Australian companies to bring products to market more quickly where there are complex trade-offs between interacting actors. The simulation guidelines will help understand interaction in complex systems and the identification of important factors in the air traffic domain. The research will also preserve the leading position of Australian technology for high quality simulations of air traffic control. The new methods will help Australian SMEs using agent technology, of which there are several.Read moreRead less
Visual analytics for massive multivariate networks. Visual analytics for massive multivariate networks. This project aims to create methods to visually analyse massive multivariate networks. The amount of network data available has exploded in recent years: software systems, social networks and biological systems have millions of nodes and billions of edges with multivariate attributes. Their size and complexity makes these data sets hard to exploit. More efficient ways to understand the data ar ....Visual analytics for massive multivariate networks. Visual analytics for massive multivariate networks. This project aims to create methods to visually analyse massive multivariate networks. The amount of network data available has exploded in recent years: software systems, social networks and biological systems have millions of nodes and billions of edges with multivariate attributes. Their size and complexity makes these data sets hard to exploit. More efficient ways to understand the data are needed. This project will design, implement and evaluate visualisation methods for massive multivariate network data sets. This research is expected to be used by Australian software development, biotechnology and security companies to exploit their data.Read moreRead less
A fast and effective automated insider threat detection and prediction system. Threats from insiders directly compromises the security, privacy and integrity of Australian e-commerce, large databases and communication channels. This project will provide an essential step in combating this criminal activity by developing methods to detect such threats and secure the public's information against exposure and identity theft.