Honours and Masters project

Cybersecurity researchers are contemplating how to best use the currently trending AI techniques to aid cybersecurity, beyond just for classification. 

The aim of this Honours project is to get the student to work with the supervisors on the latest AI techniques to adapt them over for cybersecurity, building first on baseline approaches for which code is available.

The student is free to discuss with the supervisor on any specific aspects of his/her choice and interest.

Cryptographic applications require a careful implementation to avoid side-channel attacks that reveal secret information to an attacker (e.g. via run-time measurements). In particular, for floating point arithmetic it is known that the timing of some basic arithmetic operations and functions on some CPUs depends on the input values [1], and thus the timing may leak secret information when the input contains secret values. Constant-time implementation tries to mitigate such run-time timing leakage on typical devices.

Following the success of the Human Genome Project, the entire scientific community witnessed a large data explosion in genomics, which was also aided by advances in molecular biology technologies such as next-generation sequencing. These high-throughput technologies enable comprehensive molecular profiling of cancer cell lines, including gene expression. Regardless of the use of gene-based assays, they provide abundant genomic information for identifying participating genes (biomarkers) that contribute to the chemoresistance process in cancer cells.

The need: Early detection and diagnosis of eye conditions is critically important as many diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration, often show minimal or even no symptoms. Glaucoma is called the "silent thief of sight" since it progressively damages the eyes without any noticeable signs.

In our current day and age, there is an exponential growth in multimodal data, especially the transition of social media from text-based communications to video formats which can be observed with the rise of TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram Reels. This shift requires a shift in how we analyze multimodal data as we will have to move away from traditional text sentiment analysis such as TextCNN. Multimodal data presents us the opportunity to improve on text-based analysis given the new information that is coded in speech and visuals that can provide additional context for a sentiment.

AI has been growingly used in Medicine. There are big opportunities for AI in medical research, including medical imaging diagnosis. AI and Deep Learning have been used to detect and classify lesions in various diseases, such as cancers. 

Multimedia content such as audio, image, and video are stored and transported in compressed forms. Various standards are designed to encode the content at the highest possible level while minimizing distortion. Some commonly used compression standards include MP3 for audio, JPEG for still image, H.264/AVC for video. Despite the vast differences in signal characteristics, most compression standards have two things in common: transformed-quantized coefficients and scale factor (quantization table in JPEG and AVC). The coefficients are usually coded as a product of sign_bit and magnitude.

Podcasts have become a very popular way for small communities to create content that is meaningful for them and reach a wider audience. However, many of the skills and equipment needed to produce a good podcast are inaccessible to non-professionals and there is often a learning curve attached to gain necessary skills. In addition, the production process is seen as an individual effort (one or two producers working in isolation to produce the final edit).

Radio is one of the primary modes in which communities across the world receive important information and build connection with wider society. Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have long been leveraging radio, and in particular Community Radio

In many parts of the world, audio is the preferred interface for social interactions. There has been a huge push towards audio-based interfaces for engaging marginalised communities in rural and Developing countries contexts.

As part of this project, you will work closely with a community organisation or NGO (this can either be an organisation that you have existing links with or we will connect you with one of our partner NGOs). Working in collaboration with the org, you will find out challenges they face in giving voice to their communities/beneficiaries that can be addressed through social media (for instance, perhaps they want to run an awareness raising campaign about the difficulties faced by the community and they want the communities to be very involved in this).