Researcher

Associate Professor Helen Paik

Fields of Research (FoR)

Distributed computing and systems software, Software architecture, Cyberphysical systems and internet of things, Cybersecurity and privacy, Data and information privacy, Software Engineering, Database Management, Web Technologies (excl. Web Search), Interorganisational Information Systems and Web Services

Biography

My career in computing started with IBM Australia as a junior application programmer in 1998. Although I loved the teamwork environment in industry, I realised my passion was in academia where I can work with students and new ideas. After receiving my PhD degree in Computer Science (in Web data integration) at UNSW in 2004, I spent sometime at QUT, Brisbane at Information Systems School working on business process and workflow management...view more

My career in computing started with IBM Australia as a junior application programmer in 1998. Although I loved the teamwork environment in industry, I realised my passion was in academia where I can work with students and new ideas. After receiving my PhD degree in Computer Science (in Web data integration) at UNSW in 2004, I spent sometime at QUT, Brisbane at Information Systems School working on business process and workflow management systems before moving back to UNSW in 2005. Currently I am a senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Engineering. Broadly speaking, my background expertise come from areas such as Service-oriented Software Design and Architecture, Distributed Data and Application Integrations. Recently, the new distributed application platforms namely blockchains and Distributed Ledger Technology have become my main focus of research projects, looking into various application areas such as Distributed Data Analytics and Data Management, Cyber Security/Privacy and Distributed Identity Management.

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

empirical software engineering

Areas of supervision

My research program is organised around the central idea of building complex and distributed software systems. The fundamental concept in the area is automating software interactions – so called process automation technologies. An effective analogy of this concept is how McDonald’s automated the process of producing burgers; breaking the process into individual, repeatable tasks, creating a functional task module, then logically linking the modules to assemble a burger. This technology is a core enabler of the “highly-linked” modern software systems that connect everyone and everything on the Internet today. Under this theme, I have worked on effective communication mechanisms between software systems, distributed software platform designs, and applying the techniques to ‘non-traditional’ domains such as automating document processing.

Currently, I am focused on elevating the privacy and consumer right issues that are generated by the automation technologies including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchains. Nowadays, the term `automation’ is innately linked with data and having access to private information. The current discussions on privacy and trustworthiness of the companies and government as the custodians of our data are still at its infancy. As data is becoming a commodity today, providing technological solutions that protect privacy and raise the trustworthiness of data custodians have become important and exciting research topics. In particular, I have two programs on providing technological solutions: (i) Blockchain technology brings a new paradigm on how society can function when there is no trust. This new paradigm can shift our thinking around how trust is built and managed around data custodians, (ii) software engineering techniques for AI to improve transparency. The current black-box and ad-hoc nature of the AI solutions can benefit from well-established systematic engineering frameworks learned from Software Engineering principles.

My current projects involve the following topic areas:

Privacy preserving, decentralised data analytics and management

Blockchain-based systems for enhanced privacy and trust management

Software engineering views on machine learning development

Federated machine learning

Currently supervising

PhD	Tran,Frank	Kanhere, S (Joint Primary), Joshi, AM (Secondary)	Extractive Question-Answering for Legal Documents: Enabling Structured Data Extraction and Linking
PhD	Hu,Zhibo	Paik, H (Primary) (with Dr. Chen Wang, Dr. Yanfeng Shu and Dr. Liming Zhu from Data61/CSIRO)	Towards building an AI-enabled, explainable, and configurable scheduler
PhD	Lou,Haowei	Paik, H (Primary), Hu, W (Secondary), Yao, L (Secondary)	Generative Artificial Intelligence
PhD	Shen,Yifan	Sui, Y (Joint Primary), Paik, H (Joint)	Responsible AI through Software Analysis and Verification
PhD	Beruwawela Pathiranage,Thirasara	Kanhere, S (Joint Primary), Paik, H (Joint), Lu, Q (Secondary)	Secure Multi-Mode Privacy-Preserving Platform for IoT Data
PhD	Yang,Yilin	Paik, H (Joint Primary), Sui, Y (Joint)	IoT Software Vulnerability Detection Techniques through Machine Learning
Masters (Research)	Krul,Evan	Paik, H (Joint Primary), Ruj, S (Joint), Kanhere, S (Secondary)	Trust and Privacy in Self Sovereign Identity: 'Preservation of User Identity Privacy' and 'Data Sharing Trust of Identity Issuers and Verifiers'
PhD	Chaisawat,Siriboon	Paik, H (Joint Primary), Kanhere, S (Joint)	Preserving Witness Privacy and Ensuring Credibility of Evidence in Digital Forensics for Connected Autonomous Vehicles Accident