Activities in the Distributed Systems and Modelling Applied Research Group (DSM ARG) focus on the design and development of advanced structures for distributed computing infrastructure and applications. The main research interests of the group are in the following areas:

Intelligent agents, derived from Distributed AI, have attracted attentions to academic and industry. The areas of our interests are developing methods for automated negotiation, exception handling and coordination as well as their applications.

We are also interested in applying agent technologies to other computing disciplines.

Mobile computing facilitates anytime and anywhere service provision to users using small handheld devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, notebooks, and so on.

Our research investigates issues pertaining to the performance, reliability, and consistency of mobile information sources and services. These issues are significantly distinct from the (wired) distributed computing due to the characteristics of mobile computing devices. Such devices are generally resource-scarce having limited bandwidth, less reliability and limited computational resources.

The mobility of data, applications, and the processing units further contribute to these issues. We address these issues using network, multi-agents and transaction technologies. Networking techniques aim to optimise the performance of mobile information services. Multi-agent and transaction technologies aim at ensuring reliability and consistency of such services.

We emphasize on three aspects of the security:

1. Parallel/distributed computation of number-theoretic and cryptographic problems
2. Analysis of the complexity of the number-theoretic and cryptographic algorithms
3. Internet security and secure e-commerce.