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 464 matching student topics
Displaying 37–48 of 464 results
Optimisation of piezoelectric materials for robotics applications
Piezoelectricity, which translates to “pressure electricity”, is the phenomenon in which certain materials convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Such materials are common-place and are used in a variety of applications including sensor, actuator, and energy harvesting technologies. The capabilities of such piezoelectric materials have not yet been fully realised. We plan to use computational structural optimisation to design new piezoelectric materials and components that may contribute to novel sensing technologies for robotics applications. Essentially, robots need …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Information retrieval and coding methods for large scale bioinformatics
Advances in sequencing technologies over the past two decades have led to an explosion in the availability of genomic sequence data and an increasingly urgent need for scalable clustering and search facilities. One approach is to encode sequences as binary vectors in a high-dimensional space, simplifying the comparison and allowing it to be computed very rapidly using bit-level operations.Coupled with these ideas is the need to provide clustering methods and efficient indexing and lookup in response to search queries. One …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Extraction and formulation of astaxanthin produced in Phaffia rhodozyma fermentations
Traditionally derived from unsustainable petrochemicals, astaxanthin (AX) can also be sustainably produced by microbial fermentation. The yeast Phaffia rhodozyma naturally produces AX as its main fermentation product through sugar assimilation.In previous studies, we improved the bioprocess to produce (upstream) AX in P. rhodozyma. This project aims to investigate the extraction, recovery, and formulation (downstream) of the AX produced in our improved AX production process.AX is a carotenoid pigment and potent antioxidant naturally occurring in some ocean animals such as salmonids …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Facilitating gaining trust in AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are automating service delivery in many sectors. Businesses have shown interest in using these technologies for delivering complex services in a way that meet the unique needs of customers. The technology gained more popularity particularly during Covid-19 outbreak, as it helped organisations to become more efficient in service delivery and increased service availability for customers / service applicants. However, gaining managers’ and users’ trust in these systems has always been a significant challenge. Particularly, managers and …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
Building explainable and trustworthy intelligent systems
Existing machine learning-based intelligent systems are autonomous and opaque (often considered “black-box” systems), which has led to the lack of trust in AI adoption and, consequently, the gap between machine and human being.In 2018, the European Parliament adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which introduces a right of explanation for all human individuals to obtain “meaningful explanations of the logic involved” when a decision is made by automated systems. To this end, it is a compliance that an intelligent …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Multi-modal sentiment analysis
In deep learning models, language models and word embedding methods have become popular to understand the context of text data. Popular language models such as BERT have limitations in terms of the token length. There exist some corpora that have longer text with an average of 1000 tokens. Additionally, these corpora are text-heavy and only include some images.In our prior works, we have developed several multi-modality models on social media datasets.
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Curvature dependence of reaction-diffusion wave front speed with nonlinear diffusion.
Reaction-diffusion waves describe the progression in space of wildfires, species invasions, epidemic spread, and biological tissue growth. When diffusion is linear, these waves are known to advance at a rate that strongly depends on the curvature of the wave fronts. How nonlinear diffusion affects the curvature dependence of the progression rate of these wavefronts remains unknown.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Optimising bone shape with memory networks
Bone is a dynamic tissue that optimises its shape to the mechanical loads that it carries. Bone mass is accrued where loads are high, and reduced where loads are low. This adaptation of bone tissue to mechanical loads is well-known and observed in many instances. However, what serves as a reference mechanical state in this shape optimisation remains largely unknown.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Automatic Generation of Software Vulnerability Datasets for Machine Learning
In recent years, machine learning has enjoyed profound success in a range of interesting applications such as natural language processing, computer vision and speech recognition. It has been possible mainly due to, in addition to better computing resources, the availability of large amounts of training datasets to these applications. However, in software security research, the lack of large datasets is an open problem that makes it challenging for machine learning to reason about security vulnerabilities found in real-world software. The …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
SleepBeta: co-designing technology with young adults to promote healthy sleep
The aim of the SleepBeta project is collaborate with young adults to promote healthy sleep. Sleep, together with healthy diet and exercise, is a key pillar for a healthy lifestyle. It is important to feeling well and to performing well at school and in university. However, young adults often have unhealthy sleep habits due to stress caused by exams, leisure activities and work commitments, and digital technologies used at night-time. Over the last few years, we explored different sleep and …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
Smoke and mirrors: intercepting the elusive molecular precursors of soot
Soot formation occurs via a complex network of chemical reactions leading from simple gases to macromolecular aggregates. Despite being central to our understanding of extreme environments ranging from engines, to bushfires and interstellar clouds, the critical steps and intermediates in these reactions are poorly described.This project will deploy advanced mass spectrometry and laser-based methods to generate, isolate and interrogate gas phase free radical intermediates and elucidate their role in molecular weight growth processes.Through these chemical insights, advanced computational models will …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Elucidating the gas-phase reactivity and photochemistry of halide anions
Bromine and iodine are suspected to be responsible for most of the halogen-induced ozone loss in the stratosphere but are not currently included in atmospheric models due to a paucity of knowledge of the gas-phase chemistry and photochemistry of their anions and radicals.This project will develop and deploy advanced mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy techniques to enable precision measurements of the reactions and photo- reactions of gas-phase iodide and bromide anions and their oxides.These state-of-the-art measurements of reaction kinetics and …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
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