Operations

Macquarie University researchers have demonstrated a new way of linking personal records and protecting privacy. The first application is in identifying cases of rare genetic disorders. There are many other potential applications across society.

The research will be presented at the 18th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Melbourne on 12 July.

A five-year-old boy in the US has a mutation in a gene called GPX4, which he shares with just 10 other children in the world. The condition causes skeletal and central nervous system abnormalities. There are likely to be other children with the disorder recorded in hundreds of health and diagnostic databases worldwide, but we do not know of them, because their privacy is guarded for legal and commercial reasons.

But what if records linked to the condition could be found and counted while still preserving privacy? Researchers from the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub have developed a technique to achieve exactly that. The team includes Dr Dinusha Vatsalan and Professor Dali Kaafar of the University’s School of Computing and the boy’s father, software engineer Mr Sanath Kumar Ramesh, who is CEO of the OpenTreatments Foundation in Seattle, Washington.

A path to cognition

Five major changes in the computational capacity of brains have led to the world of intelligent life around us.

That’s the conclusion of Professor Andrew Barron from Macquarie University with Dr Marta Halina from the University of Cambridge and Professor Colin Klein from the Australian National University (ANU), in a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They say that one billion years of evolution has led to five fundamentally different types of brains, each suited to its purpose.