About

Health Informatics and Knowledge Engineering Research (HIKER)

The HIKER Group is a multi-institutional computing research group that is based at Massey University (MU), the University of Montana (UMontana) and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).   

The group investigates research problems in Computing and Information Technology. Research projects are directly related to and inspired  by the practical application domain problems whose solutions may be commercialisable.

Research in knowledge modelling and representation within the HIKER Group focuses on investigating formal ways of representing knowledge that is learned from data or published as natural language documents (e.g., scientific research publications, guidelines and protocols, laws and regulations, and standards) with the aim of incorporating this knowledge in a manageable and flexible way into computational paradigms and formalisms for solving specific problems in various application domains especially Healthcare Informatics and Agriculture.

Research in Computer Security and Privacy and the Cloud within the HIKER Group focuses on investigating new security and privacy approaches, paradigms, metaphors and mechanisms for personal and sensitive information, particularly the electronic healthcare records (EHR). The research context is generally characterised by increasingly connected world within environments such as Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.

Research in the emerging domain of the Internet of Things (IoT) combined with the Cloud (Cloud IoT) focuses on security and privacy and on new applications of IoT to the domains such as Healthcare, Agriculture and Animal Sciences.

The HIKER Group welcomes students, researchers, industry practitioners and domain experts as members. The Group values both local and international research collaboration involving both researchers and domain experts. To join the HIKER Group from any where in the world contact Kuda Dube (Massey University) or Tom Gallagher (University of Montana) or Scott McLachlan (Queen Mary University of London, UK).