Honours and Masters project

Cloud Data centres are designed to support the business requirements of cloud clients. However, due to the complexities of data centre infrastructure and their software systems, cloud service providers often do not have access to quality data regarding their IT equipment. This hinders their ability to better optimise the quality of their services and system performance. A clear message from across the industry is that better data allows for better decision making and resource management.

Pathfinding is fundamental operation in video game AI: virtual characters need to move from location A to location B in order to explore their environment, gather resources or otherwise coordinate themselves in the course of play. Though simple in principle such problems are surprisingly challenging for game developers: paths should be short and appear realistic but they must be computed very quickly, usually with limited CPU resources and using only small amounts of memory.

Pose Tracking is the task of estimating multi-person human poses in videos and assigning unique instance IDs for each keypoint across frames. Accurate estimation of human keypoint-trajectories is useful for human action recognition, human interaction understanding, motion capture and animation.

Neuroscience is becoming an exciting and multidisciplinary field, with a combination of biology, psychology, engineering, and large-data processing. This project is suitable for those who are motivated to apply data-processing skills to biological questions. Our research projects investigate how neural circuits in the mouse brain work during a behavioural task; we visualise neural activity in vivo using advance fluorescent microscopy (two-photon imaging), while filming the behaviour of mice.

Develop NLP tools to track politicians’ campaign promises on traditional and social media: With applications to Australian, Indian and/or US politics.

Issues and solutions exist on different aspects of the management of real-time data, such as persistence, visualisation, and online processing. This project is a research project to identify the significant issues of real-time data management in structural health monitoring (SHM), particularly for bridges, and implement an integrated software solution for enterprise usage. This project involves time series database design, visualisation and online processing of time series, and service-oriented and web-based software development.

Specific scope of works and deliverable are:

This project focuses on the locomotion pattern of freely moving animals. The model organism we used is C. elegans, a transparent nematode about 1 mm, which displays a sinusoidal movement on the plates. The locomotor performance of adult worms can be decomposed into four fundamental patterns called eigenworms using principal component analysis, and the locomotion of freely moving worms exploring the environment is represented as a linear combination of these four patterns (Ref: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000028 and https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211447110  ).

A major challenge in cancer therapeutics is to kill tumour cells without harming normal cells in the body. Traditional chemotherapy tries to do this by killing cells that are fast dividing, a characteristic hallmark of cancer cells, however as many other cells in the body are also fast dividing – such as those in the hair and the gut – chemotherapy typically results in undesirable side effects. Newer targeted therapies are designed to specifically target cancer cells, by exploiting the genetic changes that distinguish tumour cells from normal cells.

Despite enormous progress in research, cancer remains a devastating disease worldwide. Since generally not all patients will respond to a specific therapy, a great challenge in cancer treatment is the ability to predict which patients would benefit (or not) to a therapy of choice. This helps improve treatment efficacy and minimise unnecessary sufferings by non-responders. There is thus a pressing need to identify robust biomarkers (i.e. genes/proteins) that can accurately predict the right patients for the right drugs.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to evolve as a major threat to human health and new strategies are required for the treatment of AMR infections. Bacteriophages (phages) that kill bacterial pathogens are being identified for use in phage therapies, with the intention to apply these bactericidal viruses directly into the infection sites in bespoke phage cocktails. Using such a biological agent for infection control requires deep understanding of the phage.