Research Directions / Focus

Core Research Directions

Resiliency & Reliability

Lead: Nasrin Sohrabi (Deakin University)

Tackling security issues, abnormal behaviors, and operational failures to improve the resilience and reliability of computing systems and AI models. Major research includes:

  • Anomaly Detection (including fraud and scam detection, system, data, and behavioral anomalies)
  • Adversarial Machine Learning (poisoning, backdoors, evasion attacks)
  • Crash Failures in distributed systems
  • Byzantine Fault Tolerance and malicious node behavior

Privacy-Preserving Data Security and Access Control

Lead: Ahmad Salehi Shahraki (La Trobe University)

Research focused on the design and evaluation of secure, privacy-preserving, and cryptography-enabled mechanisms for data protection, authentication, authorisation, and controlled information sharing across distributed, decentralised, and multi-domain environments. Major research includes:

  • Authentication and authorisation mechanisms
  • Applied cryptography and cryptographic protocols
  • Privacy-preserving access control
  • Secure cross-domain information sharing
  • Decentralised and blockchain-enabled access control

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning & Applied Privacy

Lead: Muneeb UI Hassan (Deakin University)

Research focused on developing privacy-preserving and secure mechanisms for cyber-physical, distributed, and intelligent systems. Major research includes:

  • Differential Privacy
  • Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning
  • Privacy Attacks, including linkage, identity, membership inference, and reconstruction attacks
  • Federated and Robust Learning
  • Applied Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems, including Smart Grids, Electric Vehicles, and IoT Systems

Scalability & Performance

Lead: Nasrin Sohrabi (Deakin University)

Addressing system failures and workload challenges for scalable and high-performance computing:

  • Consensus Algorithm
  • Data Recovery
  • Performance Modeling
  • Profiling
  • Resource Scheduling

Systems and Applications We Focus On

Distributed Systems

Focus on:

  • Blockchain
  • IoT / Edge
  • DAG

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)

Focus on:

  • Smart Grids
  • IIoT

LLM-Based Applications

Focus on:

  • Code-Assistance & Development
  • Agent-based E-Commerce