January 01, 2004
American Australian Business

The University of Sydney’s School of IT is examining biogrids, online scams, and the future of computing.

The School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney is internationally known for excellence in both cutting-edge research and innovative teaching. Highlighted here are just three current developments, the first being ‘Scamseek’, Australia’s largest research project in language technology.

The Scamseek project, in the school’s Language and Knowledge Management Research Laboratory, has a A$1m budget to build a surveillance tool for identifying internet financial scams. A joint research project between ASIC, the Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre (CMCRC), the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, the project aims to develop an automatic internet document classification system with the potential to:

• determine potential risk by scanning entities against public and private databases;
• assess and aggregate the risk associated with information on a website;
• identify people and companies mentioned on a website; and
• mark sites above an acceptable risk threshold for further analysis.

Professor Jon Patrick, team leader for the CMCRC and the University of Sydney, says the system would use the most up-to-date research in document classification, and new analytical methods for identifying the meaning of words.

“Scams that are run through websites tend to use certain words in certain ways – but they can be cleverly disguised,” he says. “With our colleagues Professor Christian Matthiessen and doctoral scholar Maria Couchman from the Linguistics Department at Macquarie University, we’re using new theories on textual meanings to unravel the deep linguistic features that will enable us to detect scam proposals no matter what surface form of language they use.”

Bio-Grids

‘Grid Computing’ is an emerging technology that enables large-scale resource sharing and coordinated problem solving within distributed and often loosely-coordinated groups – sometimes termed ‘virtual organisations’. By providing scalable, secure, high-performance mechanisms for discovering and negotiating access to remote resources, grid technologies promise resource sharing on an unprecedented scale, enabling geographically distributed groups to work together in previously impossible ways.

The Networks and Systems Research Laboratory at the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies is developing a Bio-Grid to facilitate first-class bioinformatics research. Bioinformatics deals with the computational approaches to solve biological-related problems focused on data from DNA and protein sequences, functional genomics, proteomics, and macromolecular structures.

A Bio-Grid can be ‘built out’ by connecting hundreds of computers and databases to process terabytes of data in a speedy and secure manner. The Bio-Grid concept could be the idea platform enabling a ‘bio-polis’ or ‘biotech hub’, to connect hundreds of computers in universities, hospitals and medical research centres nationally and internationally.

Visual User Interfaces

The current grand challenge for human-computer interaction is to replace the mouse-keyboard-screen interface that currently resides on desktops throughout the world. But it is not clear what will replace it – something more gestural, more ambient, more adaptive? Will the computer input be based on video processing or audio signals? Will the output be visualisations on walls or furniture, audio signals, or haptic devices in the furniture or clothing?

These answers will be the key to the next generation of commodity user interfaces. The economic significance is enormous – if Australia can play a major role, the benefits would be huge.