The Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES) provides eligible students with the opportunity to participate in a research project. If you're interested in research and thinking of pursuing a research degree the scheme is an opportunity to see if research is right for you. Further information about the scheme is available on HiQ.
QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for VRES. Search to find a topic that interests you.
Found 182 matching student topics
Displaying 1–12 of 182 results
Mapping the Strategic Continuity: An Analysis of Objective-to-Evaluation Alignment in Real-World Communication Cases
Extant research has discussed the application of strategy in communication research and practice. Despite its extensive application, the concept of strategy has been undertheorized and approached with taken-for-granted assumptions. According to Andersson (2024), strategy emerges from everyday activities and strategizing exists in all the activities within the communication practice. Meanwhile, more research is needed on strategizing in communication as the “black box” of strategic making, especially how it unfolds in different contexts. As such, this study addresses this gap by …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
Statistics via Scalable Monte Carlo
Monte Carlo methods use random sampling to approximate solutions to challenging problems. These methods are helpful for statistical models with many parameters, as discussed in this short video. The methods are particularly useful for Bayesian inference where one wishes to get a rigorous understanding of parameter uncertainty.Despite having many advantages over their competitors, Monte Carlo methods can be very slow in the context of big data. In this project, you'll help develop scalable Monte Carlo methods to enable timely and …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre
- Centre for Data Science
Improving Zero-Shot Vienna Code Classification
Every trademark logo is tagged with "Vienna codes" — a standard list of about 1,500 categories describing what's in the image (a star, an animal, a crown, a certain style of lettering, and so on). Today, experts assign these tags by hand, which is slow and needs training. This project explores how to tag logos automatically without teaching the system from labelled examples. The idea: an AI model looks at a logo and describes it in words, and those words …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Raytracing modelling of Parabolic Trough systems for optical analysis in IPH processes yield
Solar parabolic trough collectors (PTCs) are a proven and competitive technology for Industrial Process Heat (IPH) generation. As with other concentrating solar technologies, PTCs are affected by soiling — the deposition of airborne dust and pollutants on reflective surfaces — which degrades optical efficiency and directly impacts power generation yield, O&M costs, and cleaning scheduling. Unlike flat reflectors, PTCs present a curved geometry subject to continuous tracking motion, varying tilt angles, and complex local aerodynamics, all of which govern particle …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre
- Energy Transition Centre
Local positioning system field trials and demos
The Local Positioning System is a major initiative to provide a global alternative to GPS, that works when and where GPS does not, and enables the tracking of robots, assets, and any thing of interest that moves.
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre
- Centre for Robotics
Coastal Habitable Water Infrastructures
Urban coastal areas are increasingly emerging as the first line of adaptation and defence against extreme weather events, including sea-level rise, flooding, and storm surges, while simultaneously becoming sites of urban intensification to accommodate growing populations. Under these pressures, shore and foreshore water infrastructures can no longer afford to segregate habitation from infrastructure. This research reconceptualises coastal shores and foreshores as territories where water infrastructures and human and non-human habitation are intricately entangled in future urban conditions. It explores a …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
- Research centre
- Centre for Environment and Society
Closing the implementation gap: understanding sustainability trade-offs in regulatory decision-making pathways
Regulatory decision-making in Australia relies on the evidence provided in environmental impact assessments (EIA) of supporting project applications. The minister must take a range of matters including the principles of ecologically sustainable development (defined in Section 3A of the EPBC Act) into account using the EIA as evidence when making decisions. Yet these decisions are increasingly constrained by complex sustainability trade‑offs (Gibson and Fonseca, 2022), where regulators must balance ecological protection, economic development, and social expectations amid growing uncertainty and …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
Affordable underwater acoustic communications
Communication is an enabling technology for underwater systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), sensor networks, and diver support equipment. These systems cannot use radio frequency (RF) links, because radio waves are heavily absorbed by water, and poor visibility rules out optical links. Only acoustic communication is suitable. The underwater acoustic channel is bandwidth-limited, slow, and degraded by multipath, Doppler, and noise, making underwater modems a demanding signal processing and embedded systems problem.Commercial underwater modems exist but are expensive and …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Signal processing with small BOM
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
mmWave radar interface and signal processing system
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar systems are widely used in applications such as automotive sensing, robotics, and industrial automation for object detection, range estimation, and velocity measurement.In this project, students will design and implement a complete interface to a commercial mmWave radar module using either an FPGA platform or an NVIDIA Jetson embedded system. The project will include low-level hardware/software interfacing as well as basic radar signal processing to extract meaningful information from the radar data.
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Applying statistics to LLM evaluations
There is a need to evaluate the performance and quality of LLM-based applications at the ABS. Such evaluations can be complex, and often depend not only on the LLM, but on its surrounding architecture, the use-case task it is performing, and the business domain. The ABS are developing their capability in designing and running these evaluations ("evals" ) for LLM-based use-cases. To date, running "evals" typically involves testing a model’s performance over a finite evaluation dataset, with no consideration for …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre
- Centre for Data Science
Assessment of calibration weighting methods using incomplete auxiliary information
In survey sampling, it is often desirable to use available auxiliary information in the weighting as calibration constraints to improve the efficiency of survey estimates. Such auxiliary information is increasingly available from administrative and big data sources, but this information may have incomplete coverage of the target population. As such the auxiliary information may be considered as a non-probability sample from the population.
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre
- Centre for Data Science
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If you have questions about the Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES), the application process, finding a topic or anything else, get in touch with us today.