Honours and Minor Thesis projects

Note that this project is available as an undergraduate winter scholarship project

Recently, program generation and optimisation techniques have been adapted to performance critical subroutines in cryptography. Codes generated/optimised by these techniques are both secure and their performance is highly competitive compared to hand-optimised code by experts [1].

IT Forensics is the art of extracting digital pieces of evidence also known as (aka) artifacts in a forensically sound manner, that is presentable to a court of law. In doing this it covers a range of conceptual levels, from high-level operating systems and computer theory down to computer networking. 
 

The specific objective(s) of this project is to look at an encrypted piece of data and distinguish what encryption algorithm is used/employed. This would benefit IT Forensics researchers/investigators attacking encrypted volumes, files, folders, etc.

Since the 1990s, researchers have known that commonly-used public-key cryptosystems (such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman systems) could be potentially broken using efficient algorithms running on a special type of computer based on the principles of quantum mechanics, known as a quantum computer. Due to significant recent advances in quantum computing technology, this threat may become a practical reality in the coming years. To mitigate against this threat, new `quantum-safe’ (a.k.a.

Mini-CP https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pschaus/minicp.html is a minimal form of constraint programming solver, designed to allow for easy experimentation and learning. 

One of the most efficient approaches to discrete optimisation solving is using lazy clause generation, which is a hybrid SAT/CP approach to solving problems.  But MiniCP does not currently support this. 

Given a knowledge base describing the existing background constraints and assumptions about what is possible in the world as well as the prior experience of an autonomous agent on the one hand and probabilistic perception of the current state of the world of the autonomous agent, on the other hand, it is essential to devise and efficiently enumerate the most consistent world models that are likely to be valid under the prior knowledge in order to refine the agent’s up-to-date perception and take the most suitable actions.…

Building a robust and trustworthy (semi-)autonomous agent requires us to build a consistent picture of the state of the world based on the data received from some perception module.

In this project, you will build an autonomous agent in the MineRL environment for playing Minecraft or an agent for Animal-AI.  Herein, you will learn how to incorporate symbolic prior knowledge for improving the performance of an agent trained by using deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique, which is the core technique to build AlphaGo.

Android is a mobile operating system that occupies 72.11% market share globally. As the most popular mobile operating system, the android mobile app industry has been active for over a decade, generating billions of dollars in revenue for Google and thousands of mobile app developers. Several third-party Android app stores in China are estimated to generate over $8 billion in yearly revenue. Meanwhile, the number of bugs and vulnerabilities in mobile apps is growing. In 2016, 24.7% of mobile apps contained at least one high-risk security flaw.

The existing deep learning-based time series classification (TSC) algorithms have some success in multivariate time series, their accuracy is not high when we apply them to brain EEG time series (65-70%). This is because there is a large variation between EEG data of different subjects, so a TSC model cannot generalise on unseen subjects well. In this research project, we investigate self-supervised contrastive learning to encode the EEG data. This way we can better model the distribution of our EEG data before classifying it into different mental statuses. See recent work here [1].