Research projects in Information Technology

Motivation: In today’s increasingly digitalised world, software defects are enormously expensive. In 2018, the Consortium for IT Software Quality reported that software defects cost the global economy $2.84 trillion dollars and affected more than 4 billion people. The average annual cost of software defects on Australian businesses is A$29 billion per year.

Since the 1990s, researchers have known that commonly-used public-key cryptosystems (such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman systems) could be potentially broken using an efficient algorithm running on a hypothetical quantum computer based on the principles of quantum mechanics. This potential threat remains a theoretical possibility, but may become a real threat in coming years  due to significant advances in quantum computing technology. 

Cybersecurity is regarded as a high priority for governments and individuals today. With the practical realization of quantum computers just around the corner, classical cryptographic schemes in use today will no longer provide security in the presence of such technology. Therefore, cryptography based on “Post-Quantum” (PQ) techniques (that resists attacks by quantum computers) is a central goal for future cryptosystems and their applications.

This project aims to design effective and intelligent search techniques for large scale social network data. The project expects to advance existing social network search systems in three unique aspects: utilizing the geographical locations of queries and social network data to provide more relevant results; acknowledging and handling inherent uncertainties in the data; and exploiting knowledge graphs to produce intelligent search results. Expected outcomes of this project include a next-generation social network search system and enhanced international collaborations.

A large part of modern life is lived indoors such as in homes, offices, shopping malls, universities, libraries and airports. However, almost all of the existing location-based services (LBS) have been designed only for outdoor space. This is mainly because the global positioning system (GPS) and other positioning technologies cannot accurately identify the locations in indoor venues.