Topological data analysis for enhanced modelling of the physical properties of complex micro-structured materials. The way water flows through sandstone depends on the connectivity of its pores, the balance of forces in a grain silo on the contacts between individual grains, and the impact resistance of metal foam in a car door on the arrangement of its cells. These structural properties are described mathematically by topology. Advanced three-dimensional X-ray imaging can now reveal the interna ....Topological data analysis for enhanced modelling of the physical properties of complex micro-structured materials. The way water flows through sandstone depends on the connectivity of its pores, the balance of forces in a grain silo on the contacts between individual grains, and the impact resistance of metal foam in a car door on the arrangement of its cells. These structural properties are described mathematically by topology. Advanced three-dimensional X-ray imaging can now reveal the internal detail of micro-structured materials. Recent developments in image analysis mean it is possible to compute accurate topological information from such images. This project aims to investigate how fundamental measures of shape influence the physical properties of complex materials and clarifies the mathematics that underpins these relationships.Read moreRead less
Ultimately Trusted Security through Human-Powered Cryptography. Cryptography offers wonderful tools for unbreakable data security, but only between computer nodes, leaving their human owners helpless. Encrypted tunnels terminate not at humans but at mobile phones and personal computers, exposing users' secrets to spyware from search-engine keyloggers to full-bore malware planted by crooks, hackers, and foreign spy agencies. This project aims to create a simple and strong cryptography, so that hu ....Ultimately Trusted Security through Human-Powered Cryptography. Cryptography offers wonderful tools for unbreakable data security, but only between computer nodes, leaving their human owners helpless. Encrypted tunnels terminate not at humans but at mobile phones and personal computers, exposing users' secrets to spyware from search-engine keyloggers to full-bore malware planted by crooks, hackers, and foreign spy agencies. This project aims to create a simple and strong cryptography, so that humans can, for the first time, take front seat in real security protocols. The technical challenge is to build public-key ciphers, operable manually from a mental key in seconds, and from there remake human-powered versions of many useful information security protocols.Read moreRead less
Towards the prime power conjecture. This project attacks a famous and long standing conjecture in pure mathematics that has important ramifications in many applied areas. The project aims to determine when it is possible to produce more efficient codes for electronic communication and statistically balanced designs for experiments in areas as diverse as agriculture and psychology.
Evolution and functional impact of gene silencing by hairpin derived RNAs. This project aims to study RNA-mediated gene silencing in genome evolution. RNA interference (RNAi) has been widely used as an experimental tool since its Nobel Prize-winning discovery in 1998, but little is known about endogenous RNAi or its evolution. This project uses bioinformatics, high-throughput sequencing and molecular approaches to study hpRNAs, a class of small interfering RNAs, their adaptive evolution across f ....Evolution and functional impact of gene silencing by hairpin derived RNAs. This project aims to study RNA-mediated gene silencing in genome evolution. RNA interference (RNAi) has been widely used as an experimental tool since its Nobel Prize-winning discovery in 1998, but little is known about endogenous RNAi or its evolution. This project uses bioinformatics, high-throughput sequencing and molecular approaches to study hpRNAs, a class of small interfering RNAs, their adaptive evolution across fly species and vertebrates, and their functional effect on testis morphogenesis and distortion of female/male sex-ratio. The project also studies splicing-dependent small RNAs and miRNA-target interaction. This research could have applications from animal development to human pathology.Read moreRead less
Gravitational-wave astronomy: detection and beyond. This project aims to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves by using new data analysis techniques while developing technology to enable the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors. Detection of gravitational waves would constitute a revolution in astronomy, allowing us to probe the most dramatic events in the Universe with a new form of radiation. During the next five years, it is probable that gravitatio ....Gravitational-wave astronomy: detection and beyond. This project aims to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves by using new data analysis techniques while developing technology to enable the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors. Detection of gravitational waves would constitute a revolution in astronomy, allowing us to probe the most dramatic events in the Universe with a new form of radiation. During the next five years, it is probable that gravitational waves will be detected. Terrestrial detectors, operating in the audio band, and pulsar timing arrays, operating in the nanohertz band, are both rapidly approaching the required sensitivity. This project is designed to make important contributions to gravitational-wave astronomy at a crucial time.Read moreRead less
Algorithms for hard graph problems based on auxiliary data. When solving computational problems, algorithms usually access only the data that is absolutely necessary to define the problem. However, much more data is often readily available. Especially for important or slowly evolving data, such as road networks, social graphs, company rankings, or molecules, more and more auxiliary data becomes available through computational processes, sensors, and simple user entries. This auxiliary data can g ....Algorithms for hard graph problems based on auxiliary data. When solving computational problems, algorithms usually access only the data that is absolutely necessary to define the problem. However, much more data is often readily available. Especially for important or slowly evolving data, such as road networks, social graphs, company rankings, or molecules, more and more auxiliary data becomes available through computational processes, sensors, and simple user entries. This auxiliary data can greatly speed up an algorithm and improve its accuracy. This project aims to design improved algorithms that harness auxiliary data to solve selected high-impact NP-hard graph problems, and will build a new empowering theory to discern when auxiliary data can be used to improve algorithms.Read moreRead less
Ancient stars: the origin of elements. The story of the origin of the elements fascinates mankind and touches many branches of science. This project combines new stellar population models of the oldest stars with new data from the Australian million-star GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey to address basic astrophysical problems: mixing in stars, mass transfer in binary stars and measurement of the masses of the first stars. Knowing how these ancient stars behave is crucial to unders ....Ancient stars: the origin of elements. The story of the origin of the elements fascinates mankind and touches many branches of science. This project combines new stellar population models of the oldest stars with new data from the Australian million-star GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey to address basic astrophysical problems: mixing in stars, mass transfer in binary stars and measurement of the masses of the first stars. Knowing how these ancient stars behave is crucial to understanding element production in the early Universe, both in our Milky Way and distant galaxies. By statistically comparing new models to the GALAH data, this project aims to measure the masses of the oldest galactic stars directly impacting branches of astrophysics from planets to galaxies.Read moreRead less
The red belly blockchain: a scalable blockchain for internet of things. This project aims to offer a blockchain that scales with the number of participants. There have been major investments in blockchain technologies during the last year as blockchains promise to disrupt industries like supply chains. Unfortunately, blockchains cannot solve this problem in their current form, because they cannot scale. They require resources that grow with the number of participants and yet fail at providing in ....The red belly blockchain: a scalable blockchain for internet of things. This project aims to offer a blockchain that scales with the number of participants. There have been major investments in blockchain technologies during the last year as blockchains promise to disrupt industries like supply chains. Unfortunately, blockchains cannot solve this problem in their current form, because they cannot scale. They require resources that grow with the number of participants and yet fail at providing increasing performance. The project will leverage many devices of limited resources to offer higher performance and will impact the distributed computing field by establishing a new connection between energy efficient systems and highly scalable distributed algorithms.Read moreRead less
Rethinking animals in research: Developing a novel ethical framework. Current approaches to animal ethics face challenges addressing significant problems in animal research. These problems include: harms to research workers and animals, poor translation of results from animals to humans leading to ineffective treatments and poorly directed future research efforts. This project addresses these challenges by developing an innovative, empirically-informed relational approach to animal ethics. The n ....Rethinking animals in research: Developing a novel ethical framework. Current approaches to animal ethics face challenges addressing significant problems in animal research. These problems include: harms to research workers and animals, poor translation of results from animals to humans leading to ineffective treatments and poorly directed future research efforts. This project addresses these challenges by developing an innovative, empirically-informed relational approach to animal ethics. The new approach will deliver a novel framework that minimises harms to humans and animals, and improves the quality of results obtained from experiments. Benefits include a more ethically robust practice of animal research and more targeted deployment of finite research resources.Read moreRead less
Provably Secure Cryptography Techniques: Effective, Elegant, and Economic. This project aims to contribute to advanced knowledge and techniques to remove relaxed proof factors from provable security. Cryptography nowadays can be proven secure and must be provably secure before being adopted for data protection. Until today, most cryptography schemes are still using some relaxed proof factors to prove security, but using these relaxed factors was risky. The expected outcomes are proof methodolog ....Provably Secure Cryptography Techniques: Effective, Elegant, and Economic. This project aims to contribute to advanced knowledge and techniques to remove relaxed proof factors from provable security. Cryptography nowadays can be proven secure and must be provably secure before being adopted for data protection. Until today, most cryptography schemes are still using some relaxed proof factors to prove security, but using these relaxed factors was risky. The expected outcomes are proof methodologies for researchers to prove security in an easy way (effective), cryptography techniques for proving security without any relaxed proof factors for cryptography schemes (elegant), and more practical cryptography schemes with elegant proofs to enable Australians to receive benefit from secure data protection (economic).
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