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Cyber Information Engineering techniques are concerned with the Tsunami of Data on the web, the semantics of web services and the interactive web. The research work in DEBII include:
- Cloud Services and Cloud Computing
- Soft Grid, Semantic Grid and Smart Grid
- Web of Things, Sensor Web, Real time control on the Web
- Social networks, Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 ...mashups, gadgets,
- Virtual coalitions through autonomous agents
- Platform-based systems or extended enterprises
- Peer-to-peer systems and digital ecosystems
- Semantic web services and distributed Web Services
Other Underlying technology in Cyber Information Engineering concerns with:
- Cyber security, fraud, spam and intrusion detection
- Cyber privacy and risk management
- Cyber trust and accountability
- Ontologies and multi-agent systems
- XML-based systems and document security
- Information hiding, fingerprint and digital watermarking
- Value of information as a foundation for digital ecosystems
 Cloud Services and Cloud Computing
Researchers: Professor Tharam Dillon, Dr. Chen Wu, Dr. Alex Talevski, Dr. Vidy Potdar, Prof E. Chang
We focus on how to use the cloud computing infrastructure and the emerging technologies known as “Web 2.0” to build IT applications that can support organizations traditionally underserved by the commercial software market. Most commercial software development focuses on supporting large enterprise or the personal productivity of the general office worker. Smaller organizations which represent the majority of economic activity in Australia are not well served due to the cost of delivering and supporting solutions using traditional software delivery channels.
Cloud Computing is a buzz word in technology arena but in reality it is simply a method for delivering the benefits of IT to a large audience(s), economically, by treating IT as a utility service much like electricity and other infrastructure services are delivered today and these IT resources are made available via a high speed broadband network and delivered via a simple web browser to the end user. This is known as “public cloud.”
Originally developed by large consumer companies such as Amazon and Google to meet their internal needs, cloud computing is now acknowledged as a major trend in the evolution of Cyber information communication technology. We focus on the power of the "cloud" infrastructure to provide the business applications in a shared IT environment or digital ecosystems.
SoftGrid (Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure)
Researchers: Professor Tharam Dillon, Dr Chen Wu, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Dr Alex Talevski, Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Dr Pornpit Wongthongtham, Dr Farookh Hussain
The aim of this project is to provide a public semantic grid infrastructure, i.e. the SoftGrid, which supports an array of computing and data intensive e-science and e-engineering applications that are crucial for collaborative scientific research endeavours and economic development (e.g. the resources sector) across the Australian research institutes and government agencies. SoftGrid will empower scientists distributed around the globe to collaboratively carry out intensive computational and communicational research. This has a huge impact on the Australian research community, in particular, in those sustainable research areas such as climate change and mining exploration, which often require a massive amount of user involvement and computation (e.g. climate simulation, seismic-based forecasting and the like) in a collaborative fashion. The proposed SoftGrid infrastructure will enable Australian researchers to efficiently and accurately locate needed information from a plethora of data within the computing grid. It will help researchers to communicate, connect and share research information within a virtual research team. More importantly, it allows researchers to rapidly construct their desired simulation environments through easy customisation and ‘mashup’ of pre-existing simulation test beds without having to build a simulation environment from scratch. These benefits dramatically enhance the productivity of scientists when undertaking various computational and time-consuming collaborative research activities essential for Australia’s economic development, such as in the mining and resource sectors.
Digital Ecosystems (Social Networks, Business and Economics)
Researchers: Dr Chen Wu, Professor Tharam Dillon, Dr Song Han, Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Dr Maja Hadzic, Dr Pornpit Wongthongtham, Dr Farookh Hussain, Dr Alex Talevski
In a digital ecosystem, each digital species acts for its own benefit and profit by choosing different strategies (i.e. business partners, methods and models) for communicating, collaborating, socialising, contributing and even competing with others. Therefore, a central and pressing research question is: with each digital species aiming to maximise its own returns, how can we accurately forecast the overall behaviour of the DES in order to ensure that DES as a whole can achieve the desired goal in a manner that is beneficial for the entire community and all stakeholders? To address this problem, we have conducted empirical research using the simulation approach. Based on the conceptual framework of DES, we designed and implemented a Digital Ecosystems Simulator using Swarm Intelligence and Java technology. The main aim of this simulation was to explore the collective behaviour of a DES with visual representation and qualitative illustration that facilitates a deeper understanding of DES. The DES simulator has been displayed in the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library for a four-year exhibition. The significance of this research is threefold. Firstly, it is one of the few initiatives in the world that provides a visualised and dynamic demonstration of complex systems such as digital ecosystems. Secondly, it is the first attempt to utilise Swarm Intelligence to capture and simulate the behaviour of a digital species in the digital world. Thirdly, it paves the way for our future work, the aim of which is to rigorously forecast the collective behaviour of a DES and other complex systems. A very promising potential area following this research is to integrate economic models (e.g. game theory and mechanism design) into the simulation system. In this way, not only can we foresee the DES behaviour, but we can also design the ‘general rule’ of DES in advance so that a desirable outcome is always achievable through the massive interactions amongst selfdriven digital species. The resultant research outcomes can be of tremendous significance to other DES applications such as e-commerce, social networking, Web 2.0 and the like, where massive interactions occur, but the desirable goal is often elusive and currently difficult to predict and achieve.
User Contribution Measurement Framework for Social Media
Researchers: Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Mr Kevin Chai
Social media websites such as FacebookTM, YouTubeTM and WikipediaTM have enjoyed exceptional success in capturing the audience of a large and growing user community. The success of social media, however, depends on contributions made by two key entities: the infrastructure provider(s) and the content providers (users). Social media providers may decide to reward their content providers as an incentive to encourage further contribution. However, in order to reliably and fairly reward users, social media providers require a robust method for quantifying the contributions made by users. Users who provide higher levels of contribution should receive more rewards than users who provide lower levels of contribution. Inaccurate and unfair distribution of rewards could result in negative sentiment being aroused in the user community which could eventuate in user withdrawal.
To achieve sustained user contributions and avoid information overload in social media communities, the development of a user contribution measurement framework should assess the quality of content contributions. Existing research has shown that the users’ most common response to information overload is to end their participation in an online community as both contributors and consumers. Within a user contribution measurement framework, high quality content should be rewarded, while lower quality contributions (including fraud and spam content) should be inhibited where possible. This project is currently developing an automated, reliable, quality-driven, fraud and spam tolerant user contribution measurement framework for social media.
Spam Resistant Web application Development
Researchers: Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Pedram Hayati
In recent years spam has become a major problem on the Internet. The latest study conducted by Cisco estimated that 90% of web traffic is generated by spammers. Spammers not only spread spam content by mean s of email but also they find new ways to distribute spam by using (or misusing) Web application’s functionality in Web 2.0 environment. Most of the existing research approaches to address spam are afterthoughts i.e. they aim at filtering spam once it has infiltrated an applications database. Web developers’ lack of knowledge to develop robust web applications against spam and lack of a guideline in the literature for s pam resistant web application development make most of the web applications highly vulnerable to spammers’ attack. The aim of this research is to develop set of guidelines that can be used by web developers (or software architects, managers etc.) when developing spam resistant web applications. This research will implement a web application prototype based on the proposed guidelines and measure the reduction in spam content as a result. The results would be tested on a number of common Web 2.0 platforms like content management systems, forums, discussion boards, wiki’s etc.
Social Network-based Approach for Software Engineering Ontology Sharing and Evolution
Researchers: Dr Ponpit Wongthongtham, Dr Chen Wu, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon, Professor Ian Sommerville (University of St Andrews, Scotland), Dr Farookh Hussain
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in ontologies both as artefacts to represent human knowledge and as critical components of several applications. One unique area of research is the software engineering ontology. Due to the nature of the ontology as a passive structure, as are many ontologies that exist including the software engineering ontology on the web, it is effective in providing support if the end-users know exactly what they are looking for. Frequently, a person addressing the ontology may be trying to resolve an issue and may not be able to translate it into the exact concepts and relationships s/he needs in order to access information in the ontology. What end-users need is an active support. The means of providing such active support to end-users and making it easier for them to find the information they need, and providing them with meaningful output, is the issue to be addressed in this project. We aim to develop a social network-based recommender approach to provide active support and recommendations to remote software engineers. The software engineers will be ablt to effectively and efficiently access and share evolving software engineering knowledge when carrying out software development. This approach integrates the existing software engineering ontology and recommender approach through the utilisation of social network agents. In particular, the existing software engineering ontology enables an active ecology of social network agents to convey, consume and act on project information (semi-) autonomously, according to explicit software engineering domain knowledge. Recommendation techniques are used to convey useful project information and recommend tentative solution(s) for project issues that are raised by team members.
Service Space and Semantic Service Discovery for the Digital Ecosystem Infrastructure
Researchers: Dr Chen Wu, Dr Farookh Husain, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon, Dr Alex Talevski
In this work, we have defined a new conceptual framework for an enhanced Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure – Service Space – with regard to service distribution and service discovery. We have explored the junction of the frontiers of several ICT disciplines: software architecture, information retrieval, distributed systems, business intelligence and SOA. The framework integrates web services, social networking and the Web 2.0 technology by conceptualising and realising a number of original web-compliant SOA architectural styles for service-oriented computing. In fact, this is the first research that integrates Web 2.0 practices into the area of web services / SOA. In particular, the concept of being able to search for an entity in order to form a coalition with it is central to the idea of the formation of Digital Ecosystems. Traditional service discovery mechanisms, which are typically non-semantic in nature, suffer from many issues most notable of which is the poor precision of search results. Moreover, there is no method by which the quality of an entity that has been selected as a result of the search process can be ensured. In this research project, we propose a method that filters and ranks the result of search processes based on the quality of the entities retrieved as a result of the search process. The proposed system keeps track of the quality of all the entities and displays them for the user during the search-retrieval process. The search process is enabled by semantic crawlers and ontologies.
Reconfigurable Software Architectures
Researchers: Dr Alex Talevski, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon
Research has shown that component-based software engineering leads to software that exhibits higher quality, shorter time-to-market characteristics and, therefore, lowers development costs. However, developing a software application by statically integrating components is viewed as static component composition. Using this approach, it is difficult to modify a software system after it has been deployed. Re-configuration, addition, removal or replacement of components may require significant modifications to the application source-code. Such modifications have proven to be error-prone, time consuming and expensive. Therefore, statically composed software development is suited to well-defined applications with small user-bases that rarely change. However, large-scale software accounts for 85% of all software development undertakings. Such software is typically very complex and inflexible. In order to satisfy large-scale software development efforts, a framework and platform is required to facilitate the integration and reconfiguration of components. We propose a reconfigurable plug-and-play software framework and platform that enables application composition and reconfiguration. This framework and platform realise the concept of ‘model once, generate anywhere’.
Quality-based Coalition Formation for Digital Ecosystems
Researchers: Dr Farookh Hussain, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon, Dr Pornpit Wongthongtham, Dr Omar Hussain
The concept of coalition formation is central to the idea of formation of Digital Ecosystems Coalitions and can be created not only between homogeneous entities but between entities which are heterogeneous in nature. It is possible to achieve solutions to complex issues through collaboration and coalition formation. The trustworthiness value of the constituent entities, in a context relevant to that of coalition formation, is of prime importance during coalition formation. The success or failure of a coalition would depend on the trustworthiness value of the constituent entities. Other factors such as the multi-tasking capability of the entities and the availability of the entities are crucial in coalition formation. In this research project, we propose a comprehensive methodology for coalition formation that takes into account these factors in order to enable the process of coalition formation.
Fingerprinted Secret Sharing Steganography
Researchers: Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Dr Song Han, Mr Christopher Jones
Steganography is the art and science of hiding information. In this project, we propose and implement a new kind of steganographic algorithm termed Fingerprinted Secret Sharing Steganography. Here, we combine traditional steganography with another technique known as secret sharing. Secret sharing techniques split the secret information into multiple pieces for invisible communication. These secrets are then hidden within images using traditional steganographic techniques. The Lagrange Interpolating Polynomial method was used to recover the shared secret.
New Privacy-preserving Protocol for E-Service
Researchers: Dr Song Han, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon
The development of e-services such as e-learning, e-commerce, e-business or e-logistics, has raised new concerns about the protection of the privacy of entities. The wide availability and use of digital communication in e-services have augmented the ease with which personal data can circulate. This, in turn, may increase the likelihood of personal data being misused or even abused. However, no complete and promising solution exists for both privacy and meta privacy protection in transactions within the e-service environment. This project seeks to remedy this situation by unifying digital signatures and the meta privacy concept in order to develop a transaction protocol for e-service that protects privacy of entities in e-service systems.
The Design of Content Privacy Preserving Transactions Protocol using Mobile Agents with Mutual Authentication
Researchers: Dr Song Han, Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon
Mobile agents are autonomous software entities that can migrate autonomously from one networked computer to another. Therefore, mobile agents can help to fulfil transactions initiated by a client in electronic commerce. However, the mobile agents could encounter a hostile environment. For example, a server may compromise the mobile agent and try to obtain private information from the client. A solution to tackle this issue has been proposed. The existing solution is implemented using RSA signatures that result in long signatures and heavy workloads for the mobile agent. However, mobile agents will migrate from the client to a server and from one server to another in order to accomplish the client’s transaction plan. Therefore, it will be interesting to re-approach this issue.
RFID Tamper Detection
Researchers: Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Dr Chen Wu, Mr Christopher Jones
Security and privacy are of primary concern for RFID (radio frequency identification) adoption. While the mainstream RFID research is focused on solving the privacy issues, this project focuses on security issues in general and data tampering in particular. We specifically consider the issue of detecting data tampering on the RFID tags for applications such as data integrity management. To address this issue, we developed a novel fragile watermarking scheme, which embeds a fragile watermark (or pattern) in the serial number partition of the RFID tag. This pattern is verified in order to identify whether or not the data on the RFID tags has been tampered with. The novelty of this watermarking scheme lies in the fact that we have applied watermarking technology to RFID tags. In comparison, most of the existing watermarking schemes are limited to images, audio or video applications. We call this scheme TamDetect because it is a tamper detection solution. TamDetect is designed so that it can be easily plugged into existing RFID middleware applications. This research is one of the first works to integrate watermarking and RFID technologies.
RFID Authentication
Researchers: Dr Song Han, Dr Vidyasagar Potdar, Professor Elizabeth Chang, Professor Tharam Dillon
RFID, as an anti-counterfeiting technology, has enormous potential in industrial, medical, business and social applications. RFID-based identification is an example of an emerging technology which requires authentication. In this project, we will design mutual authentication protocols which are server-less / server-based monitor-based authentications for RFID tags. The RFID reader and tag will carry out the authentication based on their synchronised secret information. The synchronised secret information will be monitored by a component of the database server in the server-based model and also by a component of the RFID reader in the server-less model. Our protocols also support the low-cost, non-volatile memory of RFID tags. This is desirable since non-volatile memory is an expensive unit in RFID tags.
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