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Security Lab

Security, plus a lot more else in Web Technologies

Director: Helen Ashman

The Security Lab is led by Helen Ashman. She previously led the WebTech Lab at Nottingham which has similar research interests to the Security Lab.

Chris Steketee, with his interests in cryptography, and Malcolm Pattinson with his interests in risk management and human behavioural issues, have also joined the lab, bringing expertise in theoretical cryptography and the human element. Kirsten Wahlstrom has recently joined the lab and has interests in data privacy.

Security will remain an important focus of the lab, while other activities in topical areas of Web technologies will be progressively added to the lab, augmenting its scope and creating collaborative opportunities with other labs in ACRC and elsewhere.

Some research interests include:

  • Web research: Web 2.0, searching and browsing, querying and cross-language information retrieval, folksonomies and collaborative filtering and tagging, synonyms and translations
  • Bioinformatics: visualisation, self-organising data
  • Web and network security: risk management, human behaviour, plagiarism detection
  • Data privacy
  • Cryptography: threshold crypto, pairings-based crypto
  • Hypertext and hypermedia
  • Adaptive hypermedia: e-learning
  • Personalisation of content and delivery: recommender systems
  • Localisation: context extraction, machine translation

Doctoral and project students can have a look at a slide on what projects we are interested in on our promotional slides: helen’s, malcolm’s, chris’ and kirsten’s.

Also have a look at some of the smaller project ideas that would be suitable for Honours, Masters and intern research projects.

We have made some nice posters of some of our projects as well.

Collaborative Project Involvement

  • Helen Ashman is an international collaborator with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation, an EU16.8M project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, December 2007 - 2012
  • Helen Ashman is on the advisory board for the Liquid Publications project, an EU-funded “Future and Emerging Technologies” project.

Some recent publications

  • 2009
  • 2008
  • 2007
    • Vincent P. Wade, Helen Ashman, Guest Editors’ Introduction: Evolving the Infrastructure for Technology-Enhanced Distance Learning. Volume 11, Number 3, May/June 2007, 16-18
    • M. Meccawy, P. Brusilovsky, H. Ashman, M. Yudelson and O. Scherbinina, Integrating Interactive Learning Content into an Adaptive E-Learning System: Lessons Learned,Proceedings of E-Learn 2007 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education, Canada, October 2007.
    • M. Truran, J. Goulding and H . Ashman, Autonomous Authoring Tools for Hypertext, ACM Computing Surveys, 39 (3), article no. 8, ACM, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1267070.1267072, 2007.
    • A. Pourabdollah, T. Brailsford and H. Ashman. A User-oriented Design for Business Workflow Systems, Proc. 2nd International Conference on Trends in Enterprise Application Architecture, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4473, D. Draheim and G. Weber, Eds. 2007, Springer-Verlag: Berlin Heidelberg. p. 285-297, 2007.
    • H. Ashman, D. Zhou, J. Goulding, T. Brailsford and M. Truran, The Global Perpetual Dictionary of Everything, Proc. Ausweb 2007, Coffs Harbour, http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw07/papers/refereed/ashman/paper.html, July 2007.
    • D. Zhou, M. Truran, T. Brailsford and H. Ashman, NTCIR-6 Experiments using Pattern Matched Translation Extraction, NCTIR workshop 6, NTCIR (NII Test Collection for IR Systems) Project, http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-ws6/ May 2007.
    • H.L. Ashman, T. Brailsford, G. Burnett, J. Goulding, A. Moore. C Stewart and M. Truran, User interface challenges for the World Wide Web, invited book chapter for Eds. Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko Human-Computer Interaction Handbook (second edition), Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, 2007, http://www.isrc.umbc.edu/HCIhandbook/
  • A few from earlier years
    • D. Martin and H.L. Ashman, Atomic Hypermedia, Computer Journal, 49(1), OUP, 20-31, 2006.
    • E. Brown, T. Brailsford, A. Fisher and H.L. Ashman, Reappraising cognitive styles in adaptive web applications, Proc. WWW2006, ACM, May 2006.
    • M. Truran, J. Goulding and H.L. Ashman, Co-active Intelligence for Information Retrieval, Proceedings of ACM Multimedia ‘05, 547-550, ACM, 2005. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1101149.1101273
  • and finally some fun ones..
    • H. Ashman, D. Zhou, J. Goulding, T. Brailsford and M. Truran, The Global Perpetual Dictionary of Everything, Proc. Ausweb 2007, Coffs Harbour, http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw07/papers/refereed/ashman/paper.html, July 2007.
    • R. Cailliau and H.L. Ashman, History of Hypertext in the Web, ACM Computing Surveys special issue on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 31(4es), December 1999, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/345966.346036.
    • P.J. Nürnberg and H.L. Ashman, What was the Question? Reconciling World Wide Web and traditional hypertext research, Proceedings of Hypertext ‘99, ACM, February 1999, pp 83-90, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/294469.294492.

Who’s who

Staff

  • Helen Ashman
    Currently teaching: Computer Networks and Security andForensic Computing
  • Malcolm Pattinson
    Currently teaching: Information Security, Information Security Management, Integrated Information Systems andEnterprise Resource Planning
  • Chris Steketee
    Currently teaching: Secure E-commerce, Component Engineering, Mobile Applications Development, Mobile Commerce and Technology and Mobile Commerce
  • Colin Higgins
    University of Nottingham, UK
    Visiting until September 2008.
  • Su Beesley
    University of Nottingham, UK
    Visiting until September 2008
  • Mark Truran
    University of Teeside, UK
    Visiting June-August 2008
  • Adam Moore
    University of Nottingham, UK
    Visiting July-August 2008
  • Tim Brailsford
    University of Nottingham, UK
    Visiting November-December 2008

Current Students

Lab staff supervise the following students:

  • UniSA
    • Gavin Smith (APA) (UniSA): Synonym detection and machine translation with co-active intelligence (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Mark Truran)
    • Anusua Ghosh (UniSA): Clustering of images with co-active intelligence (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Yuan (Tom) Gao (UniSA): Interoperable Security Framework in Service Oriented Architecture (D.IT.) (Helen Ashman joint with David Kearney)
    • Kirsten Wahlstrom (UniSA): A Privacy-Enhancing Architecture for Databases and Secondary Data Processing (M.Sc.) (Chris Steketee and Gerald Quirchmayer)
    • Francis Georg (UniSA): The emergence of semantic clusters: Visualising dynamic concept formation and interaction (Honours) (Helen Ashman)
    • Eric Rebelos (UniSA): Analysing web logs for tagging images and other multimedia objects on the Web (Honours) (Helen Ashman)
    • Rebecca Frith (UniSA): Analysing web logs for tagging images and other multimedia objects on the Web (Honours) (Helen Ashman)
    • Jan-Felix Schmakeit (UniSA): Clustering semantic associations to consolidate meaning(intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Michael Antunovich (UniSA): Image classification with an improved transitive labelling algorithm (intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Wayne Gartner (UniSA): Tamper-correcting optimisation (intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Christoph Donner (Hagenberg): Metasearch engine and portal for personalising querying (intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Georgy Hadwen (Edinburgh): Differentiating synonym forms from graph features(intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Diego Silva (UTS): Threshold cryptography and Security war games analysis, (intern) (Chris Steketee and Helen Ashman)
  • University of Nottingham
    • Maram Meccawy (Nottingham): Web Services for Interoperability of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Peter Blanchfield) (submitted September 2008)
    • Ilknur Celik (Nottingham): An Interoperability Framework for User Models in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Peter Blanchfield) (submitted September 2008)
    • Amir Pourabdollah (Nottingham): Theory and Practice of the Ternary Relations Model of Information Management (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Tim Brailsford) (submitted August 2008)
    • Dong Zhou (Joe) (Nottingham): Automatic Hypertext Generation and CLIR (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Tim Brailsford) (submitted August 2008)

Collaborators

Past Students

Some past students and projects supervised by Security Lab staff include:

  • UniSA
    • Xutao Tang (Norwood Morialta): Image labelling analysis (W.P.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Nick Manser (UniSA): “Top Ten” search engines’ results longitudinal study (R.P.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Michael Noack (UniSA): Clustering semantic associations to consolidate meaning(R.P.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Prashant Gandhi (UniSA): Extracting Semantic Associations from web logs (intern) (Helen Ashman)
    • Pat Dunstan (UniSA): Implementation and evaluation of tamper-correction (Hons) (Helen Ashman)
    • Salman Ahmad (UniSA): Optimisation of tamper-correction algorithms (MSc) (Helen Ashman)
    • Attiq Ur-Rehman (UniSA): RSA Key Escrow Service (Hons) (Chris Steketee)
    • Simon Lemmo (UniSA): Threshold GBD Key Generation (Hons) (Chris Steketee)
    • Mark Andrews, Andreas Diamanti Zhendong Tan, Ye Yan (UniSA): Threshold Schemes using Mobile Phone Handsets as Security Tokens (Hons) (Chris Steketee)
    • Adam Calderon, Leong Kok (UniSA): Integration between AssignIT and Turnitin(Hons) (Chris Steketee)
    • Parijaat Pathak, Bhushan Kalse (UniSA): Automated Plagiarism Detection (Hons) (Chris Steketee)
  • University of Nottingham
    • Duncan Martin (Nottingham): Modelling Hypermedia Implementation and node-less Hypermedia (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Henry Coupe (Nottingham): Non-symbolic fragmentation cryptographic algorithms(Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Mark Truran (Nottingham): The Theory and Practice of Co-Active Search (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman)
    • Maha Al-Yahya (Nottingham): A New Model for Identifying and Describing Question/Answer Resource Semantics for Distributed Access (Ph.D.) (Helen Ashman joint with Tim Brailsford and Colin Higgins)
    • John Godward (Nottingham): Extracting Associations from Web Access Logs for use in Improving Internet Search through Co-active Intelligence (M.Sc.) (Helen Ashman joint with Mark Truran)

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