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 16 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 16 results
Where should we put our sensors? Designing smarter water quality monitoring networks
Water utilities and environmental agencies face a deceptively simple question: where should we put our sensors? In a piped stormwater network, the question matters because finding an illicit discharge quickly depends on having the right sensors at the right places. In an open creek or river, the question matters because spatial coverage, transport dynamics, and cost trade-offs all influence whether monitoring will actually answer the question being asked.Decisions about sensor placement are still often made on the basis of accessibility, …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Smart triggered sampling: low-cost devices and intelligent retrofits for capturing the moments that matter
Many water quality issues are event-driven. The most informative signals often appear during short windows associated with storms, illicit discharges, first flush, or operational upsets. Capturing these windows is genuinely hard. Manual sampling is often too slow, especially overnight or during fast-changing events. Conventional autosamplers help, but they are large, power-hungry, and typically deployed only at major assets, leaving smaller drains, tributaries, pump stations, and pollution hotspots without coverage. Even when an event is captured, fixed-interval sampling fills bottles after …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
See it without touching it: low-cost non-contact sensing for our waterways
Many of our most important waterbodies, including reservoirs, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, sedimentation basins, and constructed wetlands, are still monitored using sparse in-water sensors and periodic grab sampling. These methods are costly to maintain, hard to scale across many sites, and often miss spatially variable changes in water quality.Non-contact sensing offers a different approach. Cameras, spectral sensors, radar, thermal imaging, and other sensing modalities can observe water from outside it, reducing fouling, simplifying servicing, improving worker safety, and enabling broader spatial …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Smart sensing for nutrients in our waterways: low-cost continuous monitoring for pollution tracking and real-time control
Nitrogen and phosphorus are central to the health of stormwater systems, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. They drive algal growth, oxygen stress, and downstream ecological impacts, and they are a key input to environmental reporting and catchment management. Yet most monitoring still relies on infrequent grab samples that miss the short pollution pulses that matter most.The challenge is delivering nutrient monitoring that is affordable, low-maintenance, and reliable enough for continuous deployment across many sites. Existing nutrient sensors are often too expensive …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Facilitating gaining trust in IOT systems
Many organisations have shown an increasing interest in deploying IOT systems. However, most of them and their stakeholders are new to these systems, and it is difficult for them to trust the technology. What are the technological, managerial and societal aspects that contribute to trust in IOT systems? What can we do to improve the level of trust and increase adoption of the technology?
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
Trust in Internet-of-Things with blockchain
Blockchain is an unchangeable, distributed database that provides trust in data once it is stored on the database. However, in Internet-of-Things (IoT), the data is an observation of physical context and is susceptible to noise, drift, or malicious alterations. Sensors may even be decoupled from their intended context by an attacker, which may compromise the blockchain data and its value for guiding decisions.This project aims to develop an innovative approach for pervasive trust in IoT, underpinned by blockchain. The research …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
Engineering Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell for the treatment of cancer
Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells are genetically modified immune cells that can recognise and kill cancer cells. They do so through the CAR, which recognises specific antigens expressed on cancer cells. CAR T cell therapy has emerged as an effective form of cancer immunotherapy in certain types of blood cancers and are now approved for use in patients. However, CAR T cell therapy can only benefit a very small proportion of cancer patients at present because it is very …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Development of a machine learning algorithm for high throughput cell response data in drug therapy
High-throughput screening assays are essential for accelerating drug discovery, but current assays often rely on endpoint measurements that do not capture the dynamic response of cells to drug treatment. Machine learning algorithms (MLAs) have the potential to enable real-time, high-throughput monitoring of cell response to drug treatment by analyzing complex datasets generated by multiplexed live-cell assays. This research project aims to develop an MLA for enabling high throughput cell response data in drug treatment. The project will involve three main …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Real-time Business Process Integration in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for Industry 4.0
The vision of Industry 4.0 is to support business capabilities at the edge. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enables this vision by integrating IoT with Enterprise Systems (ESs). In an IIoT process, sensor applications at the edge require seamless integration with the software services of ESs. This, in turn, facilitates the real-time correlation of sensor events with BPs. However, existing IIoT architectures lack the necessary architectural capabilities to reflect the true essence of Industry 4.0.This research aims to develop …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
5G and IoT smart ontology learning
This project aims to investigate privacy preservation protocols in a 5G integrated IoT environment through an analysis of the depth of smart-device use in common smart domains. 5G’s addition to IoT-based smart devices will be effectively deployed and utilised by a large majority of individual and organisation-based users. The knowledge-based ontology and tools developed in the project will help form the new privacy preservation mechanisms that are required for the 5G enabled environment.The development of an ontology for 5G enabled …
- Study level
- PhD, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Characterisation of emerging multidrug resistant E. coli pathogens
The last fifteen years have witnessed an unprecedented rise in the rates of antimicrobial resistance among Gram-negative bacteria, described by the World Health organisation as a global health crisis (1). Escherichia coli sequence type 131 (E. coli ST131) is a ‘high-risk’ group of Gram-negative pathogens that have emerged rapidly and spread worldwide in the period of the last 10 years (2). E. coli ST131 strains are typically resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics and cause bloodstream and urinary tract infections …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
A preclinical evaluation pipeline for new antivirulence drugs targeting multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens
A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century.’ - WHO, 2014 (1). Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health priority. If no action is taken, AMR is predicted to kill more people than cancer and diabetes combined by 2050, with 10 million deaths estimated each year and a global cost of up to 100 trillion USD. New therapies to tackle multidrug …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
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