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