Title: Rugboids: simulating goal-directed behaviour
1st supervisor:
Grant Malcolm
2nd supervisor:
tbc
Description: The aim of this project is to design and implement a tool to simulate group behaviours, similar to the Boids simulation of flocking birds, but with simple goal-directed behaviour. Specifically, the tool should animate matches between two teams of rugby players ("rugboids"), where individuals and teams have specific goals that influence their behaviour: to score tries, form defensive and attacking alignments, etc.
Title: Scripting animations of rugby drills
1st supervisor:
Grant Malcolm
2nd supervisor:
tbc
Description: The goal of this project is to design and implement a tool that allows a user to input a description of a training drill, and will present an animation of that drill.
Algebraic specification languages such as Maude allow data types and software systems to be specified in a hierarchical, modular manner. Large specifications can be built up in powerful and flexible ways by means of a variety of operations on modules, such as renaming and instantiation of parameterised modules. The goal of this project is to implement a system that allows specifications to be linked to code (e.g., Java source files) that implements the specification in such a way that when a large specification is composed from individual modules, the code associated with those modules is also combined, to built an implementation of the large specification.
The most common technique for detecting viruses in a file is to search the file for the presence of a tell-tale "signature", a sequence of binary instructions that identify a known virus. Some virus writers attempt to avoid detection by writimg "metamorphic" code: viral code that changes each time it copies itself to a new file. These changes alter the syntax of the code, while keeping the behaviour the same (think, for example, of a for-loop being replaced by an equivalent while-loop). An equational specification of the syntax and the behaviour of a small subset of the Intel 64 assembly language has recently been developed, which allows Intel 64 assembler programs to be simulated. The aim of this work is to allow searching for segments of a (possibly infected) file that have the same behaviour as a given signature.
The aim of this project is to develop and implement algorithms for this form of behavioural signature scanning. Further background details can be found here.