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 642 matching student topics
Displaying 313–324 of 642 results
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
Using catastrophe theory to prepare for global warming in Antarctica
According to dynamical systems theory, crises occur because couplings within a system (geophysical, ecological and social) create instabilities. Nonlinear feedbacks means that relatively small changes in circumstances can cause a rapid change to the system state. For example, a small increase in tourism visitors could lead to the invasion of a new species. Or, a gradual change in the average global temperature could lead to the collapse of Antarctic ice-shelves.In the coming decade, the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic are likely to …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Searching for Life on Mars on Earth
NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, has just arrived on the red planet. Tasked with searching for ancient life in the geological record of a ~4 billion-year-old crater lake, the mission science team must use our only available analogue - the Earth - as their guide to exploration.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Probing the origins of life on Earth
The history of life on Earth is written in the fossil record. In this project, you will investigate stable isotope evidence for extremely early evolving organisms. Through careful petrography and with the use of isotope ratio mass-spectrometers, you will help unravel the history of microbial metabolisms that powered the ecosystems recorded by 3 billion-year-old microbial fossils.
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Optimal conservation management in uncertain Antarctic environments
Species and ecosystems in Antarctica are threatened. Optimal biodiversity conservation is an interdisciplinary field combining mathematical modelling and optimisation with ecology and conservation. We can use mathematics to understand the system, model how management actions might impact it, and then optimise which actions should be used. For example, we can explore where protected areas should be placed, how species should be managed, or how tourist impacts should be reduced. However, the complexities of conservation in Antarctica necessitate the application of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment
The digital social contract
The Digital Social Contract research program within the Digital Media Research Centre aims to create a more just and fair information society that promotes human flourishing. We examine future models of governance and recommend pragmatic policy changes that can improve regulatory regimes in the near term.Our research focuses on:promoting good governance and the protection of human rights in the regulation of digital technologiesimproving access to knowledge and culturedata civics (the management of data and analytics to enhance the common good).We …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Law
- Research centre(s)
- Digital Media Research Centre
Digital inclusion and participation
Working in partnership with industry, government and community organisations, the Digital Inclusion and Participation research program within QUT's Digital Media Research Centre uses innovative digital ethnographic and co-design methods to understand, intervene, and advocate for digital access and literacy as vital elements of social inclusion.We help equip citizens and consumers with the knowledge and skills to confidently, effectively and ethically navigate the increasingly complex digital media environment; and we deliver actionable new knowledge of the structural conditions and circumstances that …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice
- School
- School of Communication
- Research centre(s)
- Digital Media Research Centre
Physics-informed machine learning
Recent advances in computer vision have demonstrated superhuman performance on a variety of visual tasks including image classification, object detection, human pose estimation and human analysis. However, current approaches for achieving these results center around models that purely learn from large-scale datasets with highly complex neural network architectures. Despite the impressive performance, pure data-driven models usually lack robustness, interpretability, and adherence to physical constraints or commonsense reasoning.As in the real world, the visual world of computer vision is governed by …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
A mathematical model of disrupting cell-to-cell communication by bacteria
The emergence of resistance of bacteria to antibiotics presents a global healthcare challenge that intensifies the search for strategies to increase the effcacy of therapy. Several mechanisms are involved in resistance of bacteria against antibiotics such as mutations in genes, horizontal gene transfer, and biofilm formation. Bacteria can communicate with each other through production and response to local concentration of small molecules called autoinducers.This mechanism is called quorum sensing (QS).It has been suggested that QS can influence the resistance of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Sharing economy - risk management and exit
The growth of the sharing economy has important implications for the financial well-being of many millions of individuals. Airbnb alone has more than 6 million listings around the world, an increase of more than 1 million in the last year. While this rapid growth has seen favourable conditions for these, no market has limitless growth. Recent disruption caused by COVID-19 in particular has significantly impacted on the industry. We are interested to how Airbnb hosts deal with market downturns, and …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Management
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Future Enterprise
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research
The Law and Technology Interface
Dr Michael Guihot is looking for PhD/MPhil candidates interested in exploring the relationship between technological and legal change. Candidates are encouraged to identify a specific emergent technology or application (AI, robotics, blockchain, Internet of Things, commercial space tech, CRISPR, lawtech) through which to explore the relations and/or particular existing truisms, theories or accounts of the law-technology interface. The legal focus can extend from local Australian jurisdictions, to comparative analysis to a focus on public or private international law. This topic …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Law
The Challenge of Neural Interfaces to Law
Dr Scott Kiel-Chisholm is looking for PhD/MPhil candidates considering the legal dimensions from the development and adoption of neural interfaces. We are interested in looking for candidates looking at civil and criminal implications, comparative legal analysis and the legal and quasi-legal implications of neural interfaces for supra-legal institutions like the WTO and the EU. This topic is led by the QUT School of Law within the Datafication and Automation of Human Life research group.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Law
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