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 19 matching student topics
Displaying 13–19 of 19 results
Using machine learning to understand how the world’s microbiomes are changing due to climate
Shotgun metagenomic sequencing has become commonplace when studying microbial communities and their relationship with the health of our planet, and their direct effects on our own health. Currently, there are >180,000 shotgun metagenomes publicly available, but until recently trying to treat these data as a resource has been challenging due to its extreme size (>700 trillion base pairs).Recently we have developed a tool that can efficiently convert this base pair information into a straightforward assessment of which microorganisms are present …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
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Centre for Microbiome Research
From a descriptive to a predictive understanding of the human microbiome
Microorganisms have a profound influence on biological, environmental, and industrial processes, but understanding the complex dynamics of microbial communities and how to manipulate them to our advantage remains a challenge. CMR Director Professor Gene Tyson has recently been awarded a prestigious ARC Laureate Fellowship that aims to overcome current technological limitations and transform microbial ecology from a descriptive to a predictive science. This will be achieved using as a model the most intensively studied ecosystem on the planet: the human …
- Study level
- PhD
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
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Centre for Microbiome Research
Re-localisation in natural environments
Re-localisation in robotics involves the process of determining a robot's current pose, consisting of its position and orientation. This can either be within a previously mapped and known environment (i.e. prior map) or relative to another robot in a multi-agent setup. Re-localisation is essential for enabling robots to perform tasks such as autonomous monitoring and exploration seamlessly, even when they encounter temporary challenges in precisely tracking their location in GPS-degraded environments. For instance, consider the 'wake-up' problem, where a robot …
- Study level
- PhD
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Combining solar and vibration energy harvesting for rainfall prediction
Rainfall prediction plays a crucial role in various sectors such as agriculture, water resource management, and disaster preparedness. Traditional prediction methods often rely on complex meteorological models and expensive equipment. However, advancements in energy harvesting technology offer the opportunity to develop low-cost and sustainable solutions for rainfall prediction.This project proposes to leverage solar and vibration energy harvesting for rainfall prediction. Combined measurements from both solar and vibration energy harvesting can provide comprehensive data for real-time monitoring of cloud coverage and …
- Study level
- Honours
- School
- School of Information Systems
Identifying Indigenous contributions to knowledge
The Australian Census collects data every ten years to reflect who we are as a nation. But the data collected by the Census only tells part of our story.Indigenous people lived in Australia for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, accumulating a wealth of knowledge about Australia's land, climate, flora and fauna. Researchers have only begun tapping this knowledge as the basis for modern scientific research.This project will combine machine learning and text-analytics tools to develop a …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
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
Human-in-the-loop techniques to debug machine learning models
Machine learning models are being deployed in critical domains such as healthcare, education and fintech. The current approach to deploying machine learning models is based on considering a data-centric approach where the models are evaluated using performance measures on a test set. However, the high performance of the model on test data is not indicative of its reliability,An important aspect of reliability is in the understanding of what exactly a machine learning model encodes, and to verify if it learns …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
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