I have been an academic at the University of Otago Department of Computer Science since 2011. I have many research interests including in distributed systems, cloud computing, and middleware: particularly regarding event-based systems and security. For the official view, I have a departmental staff page. More information about my background and my research paths is available within my biographical sketch.

PhD positions that I'm keen to fill!

I am currently seeking to start a number of specific PhD projects, including some in collaboration with other members of the department. Please get in contact with me if you are keen to undertake PhD work, meet the standard of Otago PhD Scholarships, and have research interest that overlap the topics below.

• Comparative performance analysis and optimisation of computer vision code across heterogeneous computing platforms (including multicore, GPU, commodity cloud, dedicated HPC infrastructure, FPGA, etc.).
• Cloud security research (e.g. Information Flow Control in Distributed Event Based Systems).
• Task scheduling analysis, simulation and measurement for massively parallel computing architectures with programmable CPU interconnects.

Note that I am definitely open-minded regarding other topics that overlap my past research.

Postgraduate students past and present

I have had the honour of co-supervising many amazing postgraduate students over my years at the University of Otago. Indeed my students have won awards locally, nationally and internationally (Pradeesh won the University's three minute thesis competition (3MT) in 2021, and also earned an Outstanding Paper award at the top-ranked COLING 2022 conference.)

Conference participation

I participate in a number of international conference series regularly, including:

• Middleware—ACM International Middleware Conference
• DEBS—ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems
• IC2E—the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering

Within New Zealand, I have participated frequently in:

• NZeR—eResearch New Zealand
• IVCNZ—Image and Vision Computing New Zealand

More wide-ranging potential research interests

I have perilously broad research and project interests, although they are mostly "systems" in flavour. To provide a non-exhaustive idea of this breadth, and as a starting point for discussion, here are some projects I have been involved with:

• Security in distributed event-based systems, with a particular focus on the use of event-based systems in healthcare applications. This links to security in the Cloud.
• Distributed infrastructure for collaborative research. This has led me to do some investigation of the security of the iRODS distributed storage middleware.
• Green computing, leading into particular interests in virtualisation.
• Network management and measurement tools.
• High dimensional indexing methods for database systems.
• Stream compression of "interesting" data types.
• Declarative and functional programming or systems projects.
• Building monitoring and visualisation.
• Distributed file systems.
• Esoteric website content management systems.
• Efficient IP traffic monitoring.
• Electronic voting systems.

As a general disclaimer, my self-managed webpages are a work in progress (slightly ironic given that I've done past work in website content management systems that should make writing and maintaining such content easy!).