Honours and Masters project

This project develops PACE-Drone, an intelligent drone planning system that learns from experience rather than following pre-programmed scripts. Unlike current drones that treat each mission independently, PACE-Drone maintains a persistent belief over user preferences via Bayesian learning, actively discovers implicit constraints from historical mission logs, and balances exploration with task completion based on instruction granularity.

DeFi (Decentralised Finance) [Link] provides financial instruments and services through smart contracts on block chain systems. Comparing to traditional finance systems, DeFi eliminates the need of brokerages, exchanges, or banks as intermediates, and allows users to perform various financial activities including lend/borrow funds, trade cryptocurrencies, and earn interests. 

The research project aims to build:

- An Energy Market Simulator for Future Energy Systems (Smart Grid). 

Future energy systems are envisioned to be running decentrally with full automatic control, high proportion of renewable energy (e.g., wind & solar), and abundant storage facilities. With many types of renewable energy sources are weather and climate dependent, accurate simulators with good visualization and data analytic capabilities are needed for operators to control the grid.

This project focuses on understanding and applying control charts as a tool for monitoring and improving process quality. It involves designing some basic control charts and evaluating their performance in detecting process variations under different conditions. The evaluation will be based on key metrics such as Average Run Length (ARL), false alarm rate, and detection speed, providing insights into the effectiveness of various chart types in maintaining quality standards.

Passive acoustic monitoring is a well-established, non-invasive technique for wildlife monitoring, with growing interest in bioacoustic individual-level recognition—the ability to distinguish individual animals based on their vocalisations. While existing approaches perform well when all individuals are known a priori, wildlife populations are inherently dynamic, making such closed-set assumptions unrealistic in natural environments.

This project aims to design and implement an Agentic AI for Human Assistance (the “assistant agent”) to support everyday information work, e.g. email coordination. Unlike conventional chatbots, the proposed system follows an agentic workflow: it can plan, use tools, and execute multi-step tasks, while incorporating Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) mechanism at critical decision points to ensure trustful, safety, controllability, and explainability.

In today's digital landscape, cyberattacks are increasingly impacting organisations by disrupting critical services and compromising sensitive data. As these attacks grow in volume and complexity, security teams are increasingly challenged to safeguard sensitive data and maintain operational continuity. Manual efforts of security assessment often led to inconsistent and delayed results, high operational costs, and increased window of opportunity for potential attackers. To effectively mitigate these risks, there is a pressing need for automated security assessment.

As cities face unprecedented growth, the need for tools that can integrate diverse knowledge sources ranging from geospatial data to the nuanced intuition of urban planners is critical. This research will explore how Bayesian Networks can be adapted to serve as configurable, transparent models that empower decision-makers to weigh alternatives involving complex factors such as development yield, urban zoning, locality to services and infrastructure capacity.

Communication networks show interaction between people over time, and are key to the identification of criminal networks and criminal activity. This project will investigate how future events might be able to be predicted, based on dynamic graphs representing prior interpersonal communications. The project will consider (a) how Graph Neural Networks can best be used for this machine learning task; (b) how visualisation techniques can best depict both known-past and predicted-future events.

Project Description

Teamwork is a big part of university life, but not all teams work smoothly. Students often face issues such as uneven contributions, unclear communication, or members falling behind. Teaching staff receive a large amount of peer feedback. But the information is often dispersed across multiple reports and can be time-consuming to interpret—particularly in large cohorts. A system that could automatically identify which teams are struggling, and why, would allow educators to offer timely, targeted support.