Research Groups
Complex and Intelligent Systems
A wide range of complex, distributed tasks are amenable to advanced computational techniques as part of their solution. For example, software agents are capable of making flexible plans and carrying out autonomous actions in a dynamic, unpredictable environments, while guaranteeing robust properties, such as liveness (certain tasks must be completed on time) and safety (resources must be conserved and certain things must never happen).
Applications range from production scheduling for large-scale mining operations, through to software verification and testing regimes. In particular, agent-oriented software engineering is an important new technique for efficiently building software systems, and is a natural extension of component-based approaches.
For more information, Adrian Pearce,
Distributed and Cloud Computing
The central theme of the Distributed and Cloud Computing Research Group is to design and develop distributed and utility-oriented computing systems, programming environments, and algorithms that harness resources from enterprise networks to the Internet and deliver application services in scalable and seamless manner. The design challenges arise from the distribution of resources across various administrative and usage domains coupled with their availability, access price, and demand varying with time. We investigate these issues in the context of emerging computing paradigms such as cloud computing, peer-to-peer computing, data-intensive computing, and sensor networks; and explore their utilisation in supporting application domains in life sciences, engineering, business analytics, gaming, digital media, and social networking.
For more information, Raj Buyya,
Health and Bioinformatics
Large modern hospitals produce huge amounts of data daily. Much of this is used to support basic hospital processes, but it also holds the potential to provide information about patterns and trends, which can be studied as a source of new knowledge to support the broader health community.
Our Health and Bioinformatics research aims to harness this information by integrating the biomedical sciences, computer sciences, health care policy, management, and organisational processes.
Researchers in this area engage in both quantitative and qualitative research alongside staff in medical facilities and medical research centers to devise ways in which computers and information systems can be used to both mine knowledge and support practices.
For more information, Reeva Lederman,
For information about current projects, visit the Health & Biomedical Informatics Research website.
Interaction Design
Information technology is now pervasive, influencing who we are, what we think, feel, and do. What makes our experience of it positive? And how might we improve it to be usable, useful and satisfying?
The Interaction Design Lab explores these questions through research into the design and use of novel digital technologies in a variety of settings including health, sustainability, education, public spaces, aged care and the home.
The group makes use of a high-tech observation laboratory that allows users and their interactions with technology to be monitored and analysed.
For more information, Frank Vetere,
For information about current projects, visit our website:
Knowledge Discovery
Massive amounts of data are generated by medical and scientific processes. These volumes are matched or exceeded by the data arising from business transactions, by the interactions that take place using social media, and by the vast spectrum of material published on the web.
Making sense of this data — searching for trends, patterns, changes, and reliable information — is the key goal of the research activities of this group.
Techniques that are studied include core algorithmic areas such as data structure design and text search methods; data mining methods; medical image processing; medical text processing; and natural language preservation.
For more information, Rao Kotagiri,
Optimisation and Programming Languages
Optimisation problems — such as scheduling trains; allocating water; and rostering hospitals — are ubiquitous and important. Finding good or optimal solutions can save time, money and reduce environmental impact.
Constraint programming, a modern approach to optimisation, had its theoretical underpinning developed in this department. The optimisation group continues to develop complete and local search, hybrid optimisation technologies, and modelling and model transformation.
More generally, programming languages are the tools used to implement computational methods. While the programming language is usually invisible to the end user, using an appropriate language for a given task has a clear impact on programmer productivity, software reliability, and cost of maintenance.
There is therefore a continual effort to develop and experiment with new programming languages. Programming language research in the department covers the study of semantics; design and implementation of high-level languages; and programming methodology.
For more information, Peter Stuckey,
For information about current projects, visit the NICTA website.
Organisational Information Systems
Organisations around the world have become increasingly dependent on the rapidly evolving set of information, computing, and telecommunications technologies, and the average organisation today spends about 4% of its revenue on IT.
Because of the huge sums of money involved, senior managers in organisations have a keen interest in knowing the best ways to use IT to improve their competitiveness, the best ways of managing their investments in IT, and the best ways of managing projects that implement new IT-based systems.
Current research topics reflect those business priorities, and include: maximising benefits from packaged software; business analytics; electronic commerce; outsourcing; IT management; and IT security. Also of interest is the design and application of IT-based systems that are useful and effective for individuals, organisations, supply chains, and society at large.
For more information, Peter Seddon,