Canada, as with many modern societies, has come to intrinsically relies on numerous forms of large-scale information systems for the control and management of many of the core underlying services and processes upon which we, as a society, now depend. These span:

• Critical Infrastructure, i.e., power production and deliver systems, water sanitation and delivery systems transportation, etc.
• eHealth and eGovernment systems and initiatives,
• Financial, banking, and trading systems,
• eCommerce and business-to-business systems,
• Social networking and internet-based entertainment solutions, etc.,
• As well as the now ubiquitous services of: email, web, search engines, instant messaging, etc.

With this increased societal reliance has come an ever growing need for these systems to be engineered to the levels of security, privacy, capacity, performance, reliability, availability, etc. that society has come to expect and now demand of them. Performing computer science and engineering at these scales presents many interesting and complex cross-disciplinary and multi-perspective research, many of which arise due to the core need to concurrently address multiple issues across each of the there core inter-related domains of:

• Cyber-Security
• Cyber-Privacy
• Information Systems

The ASPIRe Centre's mandate is to bring together academic researchers working across these core areas into an open, collaborative, multidisciplinary and multi-perspective Research Centre designed to:

• Increase the visibility of active research that is on-going within the Faculty of Engineering in these areas of national importance.
• Serve as a focal point for technically-focused research within the Faculty of Engineering in these areas.
• Improve existing collaborations and act as a catalyst for future collaborations whether within the University or with industry, government, and academia outside of the University.
• Seek to improved the linkages with industry, government, and other academic researchers, e.g., in Law, Business, Psychology, Health Information Science, etc., to enable the development of good solutions to theses fundamentally hard problems.

The ASPIRe Centre has a strong commitment to supporting both theoretical and applied research. The engineering of real-world solutions cannot proceed without theory advancements but the theoretical solutions also need to be informed by the realities of real-world systems and environments.

As a Centre, we also have a strong and on-going interest in deepening and extending our collaborations with industry, government, and other academic researchers, whether within the University itself or externally.

If you or your organization have an interest in working with us to develop the next generation solutions, technologies, theory, and practices to address the pressing problems within Security, Privacy, and Information systems then please follow our Collaboration link for more information.