Research projects in Information Technology

Minimum Message Length (MML) is an elegant information-theoretic framework for statistical inference and model selection developed by Chris Wallace and colleagues. The fundamental insight of MML is that both parameter estimation and model selection can be interpreted as problems of data compression. The principle is simple: if we can compress data, we have learned something about its underlying structure.

🎯 Research Vision

The next generation of software engineering tools will move beyond autocomplete and static code generation toward autonomous, agentic systems — AI developers capable of planning, reasoning, and improving software iteratively. This project explores the development of agentic AI systems that act as intelligent collaborators: understanding project goals, decomposing problems, writing and testing code, and learning from feedback.

🔍 Research Objectives

This scholarship opportunity is open to domestic applicants who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

This PhD project will investigate the explainability of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in the context of human-robot interaction (HRI), aiming to bridge the gap between advanced RL decision-making and human trust, understanding, and collaboration. The research will critically evaluate and extend state-of-the-art explainability methods for RL, such as policy summarization, counterfactual reasoning, and interpretable model approximations, to make robot decision processes more transparent and intuitive.

Adaptive sequential decisions to maximise information gain and biodiversity outcomes

Development of a GIS-Based Model for Active Citizenry

Street-Level Environment Recognition On Moving Resource-Constrained Devices

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are frameworks used to model decision-making in situations where outcomes are partly random and partly under the control of a decision maker. While small MDPs are inherently interpretable for people, MDPs with thousands of states are difficult to understand by humans. The K-MDP problem is the problem of finding the best MDP with, at most, K states by leveraging state abstraction approaches to aggregate states into sub-groups. The aim of this project is to measure and improve the interpretability of K-MDP approaches using state-of-the-art XAI approaches.

Turning Point is a renowned addiction treatment and research centre specialising in the prevention, treatment, and support services for individuals affected by substance use disorders, gambling addiction, and mental health issues. Turning Point operates a network of 26 helplines across the country, ensuring accessible and immediate support for individuals in need. These helplines serve as a vital resource for individuals seeking assistance, information, and guidance related to addiction and mental health concerns.

Classical propositional logic (CPL) captures our basic understanding of the linguistic connectives “and”, “or” and “not”. It also provides a very good basis for digital circuits. But it does not account for more sophisticated linguistic notions such as “always”, “possibly”, “believed” or “knows”. Philosophers therefore invented many different non-classical logics which extend CPL with further operators for these notions.