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System Architecture and Security Laboratory

Director: Associate Professor David Kearney

Computing is becoming more common in everyday life with computer hardware and software becoming a major presence in more than just the personal computer. Cars, mobile phones and microwave ovens now use information technology. In the future we expect that these devices will be linked together into systems where the function of the combined collection of computers is more important than any individual machine. The System Architecture and Security Laboratory is doing research in new and emerging areas such as e-commerce and mobile and web-based computing that rely on the interconnection of devices.

One of the prominent issues in these systems is security. Everyone now knows how serious the threat of viruses is in email and word processing applications. What will happen when millions of mobile phones and hand-held devices join the Internet? We are looking at ways of protecting users from malicious attacks on mobile computing devices.

The future of connected computing on the web is going to be so complex that it is increasingly difficult for any one person to understand and respond to the risks. The System Architecture and Security group thus has a strong interest in the use of mathematics and simulation as tools to understand these new systems and to demonstrate their security and reliability. The aim is to prove that measures taken to protect users actually work in all cases. Our knowledge of complex systems is also useful in other fields where large numbers of independently operating entities interact with one another.

The programming language of the Internet is Java. The System Architecture and Security group has a strong interest in extending the Java language to make it more useful in mobile and hand-held devices that have many functions to perform concurrently. Beyond Java we are also interested in the overall design and architecture of web based software applications that are increasingly needed in the e-business and e-government sectors. These systems look very different from the applications that currently only run on a single desktop workstation. We want to find ways that make it easier for software engineers to build such systems. Hand-held and mobile consumer devices will in the future manipulate sound and video in complex ways. Today’s MP3 players will become tomorrow’s video enabled communicators. The key to applications for those on the go could actually be computing without computers. It is not yet widely understood that today’s desktop computers may never be fast enough or have small enough batteries to fulfill the needs of this new generation of devices. We are investigating in our research how to program devices that incorporate no central processor at all but have specialised hardware that can be configured and reconfigured to suit the needs of the moment. These are called custom or adaptive computers and are already being used in upmarket consumer products. We are also interested in the design of asynchronous computers that have no clock because these are known to use less power.

So what will all these new devices be used for in the future and how will our research contribute to their development in the community? We expect that both business in the form of e-commerce and pleasure in the form of new multimedia consumer products will become the largest segment of the computing industry in terms of numbers in the next ten years. We hope our research will assist to make this a safe and rewarding reality for everyone.

Current Projects

  • A Hardware Implementation for Membrane Computing Applications
  • An Operating System for Reconfigurable Computing
  • High Speed High Fidelity Infrared Scene Simulation Using Reconfigurable Computing
  • Tracking Moving and Deforming Objects from a UAV with Application to White Shark Detection
  • Advanced Correlation Tracking

Researchers

PhD Students

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