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 49–60 of 182 results
Fairness Under Inequality: Do AI Agents Allocate Resources Differently to People Facing Disability or Disadvantage?
Decisions about money, employment, trust and social support are often shaped by perceptions of fairness, need, deservingness, visibility and stigma. People may respond differently when they know that another person is living with a physical disability, neurodivergence, low income, unemployment, homelessness, addiction, a criminal record or another form of disadvantage. These differences can affect how resources are allocated, who is trusted, what wages are offered and whether people are treated as deserving of support or opportunity.As AI systems are increasingly …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Economics and Finance
Why Do Professionals Go the Extra Mile? Testing Intrinsic and Extrinsic Incentives with Generative AI
Health and education systems increasingly rely on staff contributing effort beyond their formal job requirements, particularly during staffing shortages, emergency pressures, administrative backlogs and periods of organisational change. However, it remains unclear which forms of support are most likely to encourage this extra contribution. Financial incentives may matter, but flexibility, career opportunities, recognition, professional development, autonomy and wellbeing supports may be equally or more important depending on the context.This interdisciplinary project combines behavioural economics, organisational psychology, health and education policy, …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Economics and Finance
Exploring Parents’ Digital Media Literacy Needs
Parents and carers are having to respond to significant changes in the digital media environment, like the social media ban and AI to support their children’s education and play. This project will explore what resources parents and carers want to support their digital parenting, and what is currently available to them. This topic is part of a larger 3-year interdisciplinary project aimed at improving opportunities for parents to improve their digital media literacies. Parents and community members in five communities …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice
- School
- School of Communication
- Research centre
- Digital Media Research Centre
Testing AI Agents Safely: Detecting Misaligned Behaviour in Fictional Workplace Simulations
Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly moving beyond simple chat interfaces and being used as semi-autonomous agents that can search documents, write code, draft communications, analyse data and interact with workplace tools. These capabilities may create significant benefits, but they also raise new safety and governance questions. What happens when an AI agent has a goal that conflicts with an organisation’s changing priorities? Will it appropriately seek clarification, escalate concerns or stop? Or could it pursue its original objective in ways …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Economics and Finance
Powering AI, Paying the Price? Data Centres, Household Costs and Local Environmental Changes
Artificial intelligence depends on large and rapidly expanding physical infrastructure. Data centres provide the computing power needed to train and run AI systems, cloud services and data-intensive applications, but they also require substantial electricity, water, land and network capacity. As governments and firms invest heavily in AI infrastructure, an important economic question is whether the benefits and costs of this expansion are shared evenly across households, businesses and local communities.This project investigates whether the location, density and growth of data …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Economics and Finance
End-to-End Biomechanics Pipeline for Human Movement Analysis
Develop an end-to-end biomechanics pipeline by integrating custom anatomical models with open-source physics engines and machine learning techniques. Accurate analysis of human movement is essential in fields such as clinical rehabilitation, sports science, and injury prevention, yet existing workflows are often fragmented, requiring multiple tools and significant manual intervention. This limits scalability, reproducibility, and the ability to translate research advances into practical applications.This project addresses these challenges by creating a unified, open-source framework that links data-driven machine learning methods with …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Spot the Difference in 3D: Detecting Scene-level Changes with 3D Gaussian Splatting
Autonomous systems, such as robots or autonomous vehicles, need to understand when the world around them has changed. A road may be blocked, a construction site may have new obstacles, infrastructure may have deteriorated, or objects in a robot workspace may have moved. Detecting these changes reliably is an important problem for real-world computer vision and robotics.This project will investigate how modern 3D scene representations can be used to detect changes across time. In particular, the project will explore the …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre
- Centre for Robotics
Design and Fabrication of a Compartmentalized 3D Printed Device to Study Microbial Interactions
The human gut microbiome is made up of many different microbial species that live together and influence our health in both positive and negative ways. However, we still don't fully understand how these microbes interact with one another—some may support each other’s growth, while others may compete or interfere. Thanks to recent breakthroughs by the QUT Centre for Microbiome Research and the Australian Human Microbiome Biobank, researchers can now grow individual microbes from the human gut in the lab.To study …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
AI for the Community Garden: Building a Practical Planning Tool for Southeast Queensland
Volunteer-run community gardens create important social, environmental and educational benefits, but they often operate with limited time, informal record keeping and constrained budgets. Garden planning can depend heavily on the practical knowledge of a small number of committed volunteers: when to plant particular crops, which beds receive sufficient sun, how much compost or fertiliser is needed, what has been grown previously, which crops work well together, and how to allocate scarce resources across the year. While this local knowledge is …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Economics and Finance
Machine Learning and Computer Vision for Accurate Foot Pose Estimation for Clinical and Sporting Applications
Develop machine learning methods for accurate foot pose estimation from multiple RGB cameras using markerless motion capture techniques. Despite recent progress in human pose estimation, accurately capturing fine-grained foot motion remains challenging due to occlusion, complex articulation, and limited annotated datasets. Improving foot pose estimation is essential for high-fidelity biomechanical analysis and downstream applications in healthcare and performance science. This project addresses these challenges by designing robust, data-driven models that integrate domain knowledge from biomechanics with advances in computer vision and machine learning.
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Machine Learning for Gait Assessment in Children with Cerebral Palsy
Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a non-progressive group of movement disorders with many sub-types and a broad range of symptoms that varies between individuals. Though the disorder is non-progressive, clinical symptoms may change throughout development and the life of a child. Early intervention can improve outcomes in children with CP. This project will develop and evaluate machine learning methods for gait assessment in children with CP and investigate how this can be applied for monitoring clinical interventions for treatment of CP. This interdisciplinary project combines biomechanics, machine learning, and healthcare.
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Who Benefits from Nature-Positive Cities? A Systematic Review of Biodiversity, Equity and Novel Urban Ecosystems
Cities are increasingly important places for responding to biodiversity loss, climate change, urban heat, public health challenges and social inequality. The concept of Nature-Positive Cities refers to urban approaches that go beyond reducing environmental harm and seek to actively restore, regenerate and enhance biodiversity, ecosystem functions and the benefits that nature provides to people.However, the benefits of urban nature are not always equally distributed. Some communities have better access to high-quality parks, urban forests and green infrastructure, while others experience …
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
- Research centre
- Centre for Environment and Society
Contact us
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.