Research Activities

Main Research at iNEXT
iNEXT is a world-class research environment for developing and nurturing innovation for the NEXT generation IT services and applications, including Internet-enabled business applications, mobile health services, high-end visualization technologies, novel image processing architectures,advanced video surveillance systems, and cloud computing and distributed systems. The iNEXT researchers have been establishing a sustainable multi-disciplinary and high quality research environment. Currently, our research focuses on 6 major programs that are all supported by ARC Discovery, ARC Linkage and other grants.

The Centre also collaborates extensively with other UTS research centres, including the Centre for Health Technologies, the Centre for Health Services and Practices, the Centre for Quantitative Finance Research, and the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies (CMOS), to enable a collaborative research environment for establishing large-scale programs that have not been possible before due to artificial barriers across disciplines.

The Centre's contribution to the research environment has been recognised with over five-hundred DEST publications, graduated many PhDs and Masters and large research funding over the last 6 years.

Research Programs

Enabling Mechanisms for Next Generation Internet Service Infrastructure.

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems.

Assistive Healthcare Infrastructure and m-Health Applications.

Advanced Video Surveillance Systems.

Information Visualization.

Intelligent Image Processing and Computer Vision.

Student Support

The INEXT research centre provides an excellent support framework for its research students with a team of active, experienced supervisors and necessary equipment for a wide range of research projects. The centre has six state of the art laboratories for conducting experiments. Academic Staff, PhD and master students use these facilities to build prototypes and conduct experiments.

Advanced Research in Networking.

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems.

Computer Vision and Recognition.

mHealth.

Surveillance.

Visualisation.

Enabling Mechanisms for Next Generation Internet Service Infrastructure

This program tackled comprehensively the core problems with the current Internet, namely mobility, security, service on-demand, and quality of service for breakthrough, next-generation Internet applications. Projects within the program include:

Serviter: a service-oriented programmable network platform for shared infrastructure;
Scalable frameworks for providing end-to-end quality of service for Internet applications;
Efficient schemes for locating Peer to Peer nodes in the Internet;
Schemes for improving TCP throughput and fairness in wireless networks;
Service architectures for integrating Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with heterogeneous IP networks;
Security for wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks;
Policy-based frameworks for end-to-end quality of service over the Internet;
Platform for large-scale Grid data service on dynamic high-performance networks.

The research program is supported with Advanced Research in Networking Lab.

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems

This program aims at researching and developing advanced innovative techniques to address various challenges of cloud computing and large-scale distributed systems such as security and privacy, data and computation management, QoS resource scheduling and management of large numbers of concurrent business process instances, energy efficiency/greening, and etc. Projects within the program include:

Security and privacy protection in cloud;
Management of large numbers of process instances in cloud;
Storage management of massive intermediate data in cloud computing applications;
Large-scale workflow management in cloud;
QoS based service provisioning and scheduling.

This research program is supported with Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems lab.

Assistive Healthcare Infrastructure and m-Health Applications

This program has focussed on developing an infrastructure consisting of sensor networks, active databases and a collaborative wired and wireless Grid for assistive healthcare. The program also aims to develop mobile health monitoring systems for elderly, pregnant women and at-risk people. Projects within the program include:

Designing and developing an active electronic maternity record and assistive care loop;
Active databases for health monitoring systems;
Collaborative Grid for assistive healthcare;
Wireless remote healthcare monitoring with motes;
Smart homecare system for health tele-monitoring;
Personal heart monitoring and rehabilitation system using smart phones.

The research program is supported with mHealth Lab.

Advanced Video Surveillance Systems

This program has developed video surveillance systems of advanced conception for high-end security applications by using innovative algorithms and camera networks. Projects within the program include:

Automatic real-time detection of infiltrated objects for security of airports and train stations;
LittleBrother: vision systems supporting detection of offenders in public places;
Using Panning Cameras for Non Motion detection;
Tracking of human actions and interaction in a video surveillance system;
Tracking individuals across disjoint cameras using robust shape and appearance features;
Vision-based multimodal analysis of affective face and upper-body behaviour.

The research program is supported with Surveillance Lab.

Information Visualization

This program has developed several advanced techniques and optimized algorithms for large scale data visualization. These techniques have been successfully applied into the areas of bioinformatics (protein sequence visualization), visual analytics of social networks, citation network visualization, and visual analytics of financial data. Projects within the program include:

Efficient and effective interactive visualization of large graphical information spaces;
Visualization of individual's knowledge domain;
Visual analytics of financial data;
Visualizing collaboration networks.

The research program is supported with Visualisation Lab.

Intelligent Image Processing and Computer Vision

This research program aims at developing intelligent algorithms and tools for visual information analysis, image retrieval, object recognition, pattern recognition and biometrics. The research is carried out in parallel based on the traditional square image structure, and on a novel hexagonal image structure, namely Spiral Architecture, which has proven to be more accurate with higher image resolution in various applications including edge detection, image compression and character recognition. The current research topics of this program include:

Spiral Architecture and its applications;
Image and video compression;
Object/pattern detection and recognition including car number plate detection/recognition, road sign detection/recognition, detection/recognition of text in a natural scene, car passenger detection, and multi-object detection/recognition;
Biometrical human detection/identification/recognition/retrieval including 3D face detection/recognition, human detection, human behaviour analysis, and multi-model biometrics.

The research program is supported with Computer Vision and Recognition Lab.