InSPiRe Research Lab | Copyright © 2003-2019, Stephen W. Neville

Introduction

Modern societies intrinsically rely on numerous IT systems, networks, and technologies for many of their core services including: critical infrastructure (power, water, etc.), eCommerce and M-Commerce, finance and banking, business-to-business systems, eGovernemnt and eHealth, etc. These systems are constructed via the integration of diverse and disparate technologies spanning increasingly global scales and they are increasingly difficult to engineer, particularly with regards to issues such as security, privacy, reliability, availability, scalability, etc. The InSPiRe lab pursues both applied and theoretical research in these domains and has close associations with several entrepreneurial ventures.

The InSPiRe labs seeks to address this engineering challenge in the broad domains of:

Cyber-Security,
Cyber-Privacy,
Larger-scale software systems. e.g. clouds, etc.
Cyber-Physical systems and application of Control theory to large-scale software systems

A basic tenet to engineering is that something cannot be engineered if it cannot be measured, as underlined by Lord Kelvin,

” When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.”
— Lord Kelvin (William Thompson)

The common goal across all InSPiRe work is to strive towards quantitatively measured research results. This is a fundamental tenet of engineering solutions in enterprise-scale cyber-security, privacy, and distributed software systems.

Supporting this research is a purpose-build cluster-computing test bed facility dedicated to reproducing enterprise-scale network environments while meeting the full tenets of scientific control and repeatability.

This facility consists of:

$500k+ in hardware
an additional $250k+ investment in the R&D of its associated control/management software system.

Current Research Areas

The InSPiRe lab’s current research activities cover a number of projects, spanning the applied research areas of:

Operational Scale cyber-security and privacy
Larger-scale data analytics, data science, machine learning and AI
Large-scale software engineering and Quality-of-Service predictability
High-tech Entrepreneurship

All of these research areas focus on identifying and addressing the theory-to-practice gaps arising in modern large scale IT systems and environments, with the end-goal of advancing our ability to design and implement large-scale software centric systems that behave predictability 24/7/365.