Student topics
Explore topics that we're looking for students to research, and discover the fields that our students are currently working on.
Within each School or discipline, you can find topics at your study level: PhD, Masters, Honours or the Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES).
467 matching student topics
Displaying 1 - 12 of 467 matching student topics
Biorefinery process modelling and economics
Worldwide transportation fuel production is currently circa 100 million barrels per day with the vast majority from fossil fuel sources. Pyrolysis and liquefaction are potential promising thermochemical technologies for producing renewable fuels and chemicals from biomass, however, the resultant biocrude/bio-oil has many complex properties inherited from the characteristics of the original feedstock, which make it a generally low-grade fuel alternative. Upgrading of the bio-oils are necessary to produce higher quality products and challenges exist to cost-effectively achieve this target. There …
- Lead unit
- School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
Formation, photochemistry and fate of gas-phase peroxyl radicals
The gas-phase chemical reactions of organic peroxyl radicals control the combustion efficiency of engines and influence the chemical and physical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite their central importance, these reaction intermediates have proven elusive; with limited experimental observations of the radicals themselves and the complex reaction networks governing their formation and fate. This study will deploy two advanced mass spectrometric methods to isolate and interrogate the chemical and photochemical reactions of peroxyl radicals in the gas phase. Direct measurement …
- Lead unit
- School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Service-oriented business models
With services becoming more and more prominent, a viable, service-oriented business model is a critical requirement for commercial success. For example, many Internet services are provided for free and, therefore, challenging their providers to find alternative sources of revenue such as advertisements or premium services. Moreover, many industries are moving towards adding services to their products or providing their products as services. For example, IT providers are moving towards Cloud and software Services and manufacturing firms are offering added value …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
Hack-proofing data analytics: A Blockchain-inspired approach to disabling deceptive data analytics practices
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. The preceding well-known phrase captures the, possibly unacknowledged, dilemma faced by organisations who are increasingly reliant on the power of data analytics to make important decisions. ‘Big data analytics’ has demonstrated its ability to deliver positive outcomes to organisations, from exposing and (dis-)proving anecdotally-ridden wisdom (or myths) to delivering targeted and effective data-driven improvement recommendations to business operations. However, drawing parallels to the practices of ‘creative accounting’, insights extracted from data analytics can potentially be …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Disciplines
- Information security
- Business process management
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Responsible Process Analytics: Let’s Blind the Prying Eyes
Process analytics is a form of data analytics with a focus on extracting data-driven insights from sequences of time-ordered events. Traditionally, process analytics have primarily been used to analyse business processes (e.g., insurance claims handling process, purchase requisition process, and student enrolment process). Nevertheless, the prevalence of timestamped data produced by today’s IT systems has seen a wider application of process analytics to other domains, including industrial control systems (e.g., power plant) and computer network systems, with a goal of …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Disciplines
- Information security
- Business process management
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Visualising Stochastic Business Process Models
Process mining aims to derive information from historical behaviour of processes in organisations which has been recorded in event logs. Business analysts use process mining software to visualise logs and derive information and insights for managers. Ultimately, this information is used to improve processes to, for instance, optimise costs, time and/or the environment. Process mining is an exciting field with lots of opportunity for research and with many commercial solutions being offered. Business process models describe what can happen in …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Disciplines
- Computer human interaction
- Data science
- Business process management
- Statistics and operations research
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Measuring soundmark temporal variations in ecoacoustic recordings
The QUT Ecoacoustics research group collects a massive amount of passively-recorded environmental audio data. The data, currently 93TB in size, constitutes more than 46 years of combined environmental monitoring. This audio data is analyzed so that ecologists may scale their observations of the environment.However, as with all data-intensive projects, the data is not perfect. One of our larger collections of data, collected from the Sturt desert, has been misdated. The result is that for large sub-sections of the data, audio …
- Lead unit
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Disciplines
- Data science
- Vision and signal processing
- Study levels
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Data centre management and optimisation with improved energy efficiency
Data centres have been increasingly built to provide a wide range of data, network, and cloud services. The increasing demand in various services requires more and more data centre resources and consequently more and more energy is consumed in data centres. It is estimated that about 30% of the running cost of a data centre is the energy consumption. Therefore, it is significant to manage and optimize data centre resources and energy consumption in data centres.
- Lead unit
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Disciplines
- Data science
- Applied and computational mathematics
- Statistics and operations research
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
Smart gird communications
Smart grid is a new concept to design and operate power generation, transmission, distribution and other related systems in an integrated environment with emerging services. There are a number of challenges in smart grid systems. One of the challenges is low-latency communications for real-time smart grid applications in wide area networks (WANs) such as wide area control, neighbourhood area networks (NANs) such as real-time demand response, and home area networks (HANs) such as home energy scheduling.The existing standards for smart …
- Lead unit
- School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
- Disciplines
- Data science
- Power engineering
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
Digital business models
The ongoing proliferation of a digital lifestyle and the exposure to global innovation raises the expectation level of customers for new products and services. The ongoing technological innovations make this possible, but require digital business models to turn them into viable commercial offerings. This is not only relevant for new (‘born-on-the-web’) companies, but also for traditional companies who run the risk of having their core business disrupted. While some see the technological change coming but struggle with the new business …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
Pluses and minuses of lipid mass spectrometry
Lipids are among the most structurally diverse of all the biomolecules and thus deciphering their many functions requires bio-analytical technologies capable of uniquely identifying and quantifying individual molecules in a milieu of many thousands of analogues. Mass spectrometry is the pre-eminent technique for contemporary lipid analysis but is challenged by the preference of certain lipids to ionise with a polarity that affords sensitive detection but does not permit detailed structure elucidation. This project will develop advanced instrumentation capable of on-demand …
- Lead unit
- School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours
- Vacation research experience scheme
Business model innovation
Business models are increasing becoming an important focus of innovation activities of practitioners and innovation studies of academics. When organizations want to introduce new products or services or need to transform their existing products or services, a viable business model is a critical requirement for commercial success. For example, many Internet services are provided for free and, therefore, challenging their providers to find alternative sources of revenue such as advertisements or premium services. In addition, the innovation of the business …
- Lead unit
- School of Information Systems
- Study levels
- PhD
- Master of Philosophy
- Honours