QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 479 matching student topics
Displaying 445–456 of 479 results
Predicting good sleep using computer science: Can we use machine learning to find out 'what's the best bed?'
In the Westernised world a person typically spends one third of their life in bed, with more time spent sleeping in a bed than in any other single activity. Sleep amount and quality of sleep have a direct impact on mood, behaviour, motor skills and overall quality of life. Yet, despite how important restful sleep is for the body to maintain good health, there is a comparatively small amount of studies evaluating key multi-factorial determinants of restful sleep in non-pathological, …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Genome to phenome: exploiting multi-omics and deep learning strategies to decipher importance of isoforms in health and behaviour
The molecular process that leads to multiple mRNA transcripts being produced from the same segment of DNA (aka gene) is known as alternative splicing (AS). This is a common form of regulation in higher eukaryotes, enabling the production of novel protein isoforms, which in turn are known to have a big impact on phenotype. Understanding the regulatory factors involved in AS, including epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, will offer key insights into important biological phenomena (health disease, behaviour, production). …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
Cobot contact tasks through multi-sensory deep learning
Contact tasks like grinding, polishing and assembly require a robot to physically interact with both rigid and flexible objects. Current methods relying on force control have difficulty achieving consistent finishing results and lack robustness in dealing with non-linear dynamics inherent in how the material is handled. This project will take a new approach that detects and diagnoses the dynamical process through deep learning fusion of multi-sensory data, including force/tactile, visual, thermal, sound, and acoustic emission; and generate corrective process parameters …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Flexible thermoelectrics for wearable electronics
Advancements in miniaturisation and integration of electronics have recently stimulated the explosive progress in wearable electronics. With increasing practical needs, our analysis has indicated that the market values of wearable electronics are predicted to boost up to US$50B in 2022 and US$72B in 2026. Currently, conventional batteries have limited applications in wearable electronics due to their requirements of frequent replacement/recharge and extra-maintenance. This is especially true in temperature or pressure sensors in some circumstances such as remote-control smart home systems …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Control of concentrating solar thermal power plants
Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a technology that utilises mirrors (heliostats) to focus the sun’s rays on a solar receiver. This provides heat for a power generation cycle, creating thermal energy.Control of the heat transfer fluid temperature in the solar receiver is crucial for the efficient use/storage of thermal energy and to minimise the degradation of the receiver. The aim of this project is to design controllers for the heat transfer fluid pumps and the heliostats using a previously developed model of the receiver's thermodynamics.
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Advanced materials for perovskite solar cells
Solar cells using metal halides perovskite materials to absorb light is one of the most important scientific discoveries. These cells have the potential to provide cost-effective solar electricity in the future. In the last decades, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) demonstrated unprecedented progress towards this goal. This technology holds the world record for energy conversion efficiency and is comparable to commercial crystalline silicon, but at a much lower cost.Currently their instability and use of toxic lead are key issues that restrict …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Centre for Clean Energy Technologies and Practices
Not included: Taxes, Fees and Surcharges - Consumer reactions to partitioned prices in online retail
Not included: Taxes, Fees and Surcharges - Consumer reactions to partitioned prices in online retailPartitioned pricing, which refers to the practice of diving prices into a base price and surcharges such as taxes, shipping or handling fees is increasingly popular (Greenleaf et al., 2016; Choi et al., 2019). Yet at the same time it is a practice that divides practitioners, where some online retailers partition their prices while others opt not to. Scientific insights on this issue are in its …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
Resilience of Queensland's housing stocks to natural hazards
With changing climate, rapid population growth/movement, aging population and economic disparity, our housing stocks are increasingly becoming more prone to natural hazards such as flooding, bushfires, extreme heat, and cyclones. We have been witnessing increased frequency of such events and their disproportional impact on housings, related infrastructure, environment, economy, and the livelihood of people.By leveraging UN disaster risk reduction frameworks and other national and Queensland specific frameworks, this research will assess the resilience and vulnerability of public and social housing …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
High-speed robotic waste separation
Sorting waste or recyclables is an important but unpleasant job, currently done by specialised machinery and humans for the hard bits. What are the core challenges that could be done by "robots that see". This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Space robotics: Scene understanding for Lunar/Mars Rover
The QUT Centre for Robotics is working with the Australian Space Agency on the newly established Australian space program, in which robots will play a key role. There are multiple PhD projects available to work on different aspect of developing a new Lunar Rover (and later Mars Rover) and in particular its intelligence and autonomy. Future rovers will not only need to conduct exploration and science missions as famous rovers such as NASA's Curiosity or Perseverance are doing right now …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Understanding international governance in Antarctica through cooperative game theory
Antarctica is governed by a coalition of 29 countries ('consultative parties') who must agree unanimously before a law can be passed. This project will apply theories from social network analysis and cooperative game theory to map relationships between the different parties, and to predict their behaviour on a series of important environmental issues.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Big data analysis to aid ecological research
We're looking for multiple students to help us answer the question: 'How can we utilise information technology to aid ecological research?'Sensor networks bring ecologists and pattern recognition researchers together to make some applications possible. These applications include assessing risks from potential bird collisions, unobtrusive observations (where the presence of humans changes some animal behaviours) and studying spatial and temporal variation in biological processes.With a significant amount of data being collected from these applications, processing and mining this data is challenging. …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
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