Level 5, Melbourne Connect, 700 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Vic 3010, Australia
+61-(0)435-964-844

MELBOURNE eRESEARCH GROUP

The Melbourne eResearch Group (MEG) under the leadership of Professor Richard Sinnott in the School of Computing and Information Systems supports the development, support and delivery of research-oriented IT systems to a wide range of research communities at the University of Melbourne. We provide research-oriented software engineering using a combination of the current bleeding edge technologies through to more tried and trusted software solutions. Key to our success is the adoption of rapid prototyping processes and solutions that ultimately lead to highly robust systems that meet the needs of the customers we serve. Indeed we pride ourselves on being able to develop systems faster and more robustly than other folks. It is what we do – day-in and day-out! We are also highly agile in our approach. Research rarely follows a predictable software development trajectory and we have years of experience in supporting evolving research needs and requirements.

 WE DELIVER AND SUPPORT RESEARCH-ORIENTED IT SYSTEMS

to a wide range of research communities at the University of Melbourne

OUR SKILLS

We provide research-oriented software engineering using a combination of the current bleeding edge technologies through to more tried and trusted software solutions. Key to our success is the adoption of rapid prototyping processes that ultimately lead to highly robust systems that meet the evolving needs of the customers we serve. We have observed first hand (time and time again!), how researchers struggle with the myriad of “potential” software systems that solve their research needs. However research evolves; researchers and communities change their minds, new opportunities and obstacles arise, and all of these things can jeopardise the successful delivery of software systems and future sustainability of those platforms. We have lived in this kind of ecosystem for over 15 years and have never failed to deliver working IT systems through our open source and fast delivery pipelines. We rarely ever start with the solution, but iteratively and rapidly create this for our customers. Many of our systems have gone truly global with thousands of users and now used as the platform for millions of dollars of research funding.

SECURITY
We have worked on the most demanding of security domains - from extremely rare genetic diseases, through to systems with intellectual property worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We have delivered systems with advanced authentication, authorisation, auditing and accounting capabilities (amongst many others aspects of security!)
CLOUD COMPUTING
A large part of our work is in supporting scalable infrastructures utilising mainstream Cloud infrastructures. This includes the full gamut of Cloud models from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). These are based around mainstream Cloud technologies such as VMware, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services. We teach Cloud computing and have educated over 500 Masters students in the kinds of technologies that are shaping the IT landscape.
BIG DATA
A common demand for eResearch is in supporting the many challenges associated with big data such as its volume (e.g. dealing with multi-Terabytes of data); its velocity in rapid production/capture of data; its variety of data and the issues associated with heterogeneous and distributed data sets; its veracity of data and the history (provenance) of data amongst other challenges. Tackling such issues often requires novel data management technologies, e.g. support for distributed data management systems and algorithms such as MapReduce and ElasticSearch. We have worked with these technologies for many years in domains such as genomics, urban research through to social media analytics.
DATA MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS
All research domains are generating and/or needing access to data at unprecedented rates – often these are increasingly diverse data sets. In this context a rich range of data management solutions now exist: noSQL databases such as CouchDB, CouchBase and MongoDB; distributed data solutions such as Hadoop Distributed File System and Apache Swift, as well as more traditional data solutions such as relational databases such as MySQL, PostGres and Oracle (amongst many others). We have used all of these technologies in a range of application domains and have considerable expertise in their deployment, configuration and utilisation more generally.

RECENT PROJECTS

Some of the projects we have delivered or are currently involved in.

Metadata Management for Confidential Records
Metadata Management for Confidential Records

Metadata Management for Confidential Records is a project with Researchers in the School of Population Health focused on making unit record data more visible and accessible through a web-based platform.

Team Analytics with MGSE
Team Analytics with MGSE

Team Analytics with MGSE is a project with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education exploring how teams collaborate online to achieve specific goals. The work involves natural language processing of team chat and identification and classification of information used to achieve specific goals.

                                           EDUCATION & RESEARCH

STATISTICS

The success story of eResearch Group. In facts & numbers.

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Papers Published
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Student Dissertations
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Total number of projects (since 2010)
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Total Grant Value in AUS $ (since 2010)

OUR NEWS

EVENTS

BUSINESS HOURS

Monday – Friday: 9:00 – 18:00Hrs

(Phone until 17:30 Hrs)

WE ARE HERE

Lv 5, Melbourne Connect
700 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3004
Phone:+61 (0) 435 964 844