Honours and Minor Thesis projects

The DNA inside a cell is not randomly distributed but rather organized in a structure called chromatin. This non-random distribution has important implications for the functioning of cellular programs. The basic building block of this organisation system is the nucleosome. The nucleosome consists of a short piece of DNA wrapped around a protein core, with millions of nucleosomes are present in the cell’s nucleus. The orientation of nucleosomes with respect to each other and the way they pack the genomic DNA determine the architecture of chromatin.…

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 aim to investigate how neural circuits in the mouse brain work during a behavioral task; we visualize neural activity in vivo using advance fluorescent microscopy (two-photon imaging), while filming the behavior of mice.

Chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) MRI provides images of molecular information and has recently been used for the detection of malignant brain tumors and the assessment of muscle tissue in cardiac infarction. Additionally, CEST has also been used to assess changes in a neurotransmitter -glutamate (Glu)- in both brain and spinal cord and has shown potential in a number of diseases including Alzheimer’s-like dementia, Parkinsonism and Huntington’s Disease and Motor neuron diseases.

Sodium ions play a central role in membrane transport and cell homeostasis. Increased sodium concentration has been observed in brain tumors as well as neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and Huntington’s disease. While 23Na MRI of the human brain was first performed over 20 years ago, the low concentration of 23Na compared to 1H and rapid T2 decay resulted in low signal to noise (SNR) and long acquisition times, limiting its diagnostic feasibility.

The glymphatic pathway has been proposed as a key contributor to the clearance of fluid and metabolic waste products, such as amyloid beta and tau, from the brain. Recently, dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI has been used to visualize the glymphatic system and monitor CSF-interstitial fluid exchange in normal and Type 2 diabetes mellitus rats, with the latter showing impaired clearance of interstitial fluid.

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process of fertilisation where an egg is combined with sperm outside the female body, in vitro ("in glass"). The process involves monitoring and stimulating a person's ovulatory process, removing an ovum or ova (egg or eggs) from their ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a culture medium in a laboratory. After the fertilised egg undergoes embryo culture for 2–6 days, it is implanted in the same or another person's uterus, with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy [1].

Blockchain technology and its popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum have most revolutionary technological advances in recent history, capable of transforming businesses, government, and social interactions. However, there is a darker side to this technology which is the immense energy consumption and potential climate impact of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

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.

Text classification has extensive uses and deep learning has improved its performance using transformer language models.  A major hurdle for its use, however, is the paucity of labelled or annotated data. The data labelling process performed by domain experts is expensive and tedious to produce.  Active Learning is an approach to speeding up learning by judiciously selecting data to be annotated. Recently, advances in active learning theory have been made, but some experimental anomalies occur which need investigating.

Multi-label classification (MLC), which simultaneously assigns several labels to each instance, is critical in a wide variety of domains. One of the most difficult is a subset of data categorisation in which classes are arranged hierarchically and objects can be allocated to many paths of the class hierarchy concurrently. This is referred to as hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC), and it is useful for text classification. For example, the output of a news article may cover a variety of topics, including news, finance, and sports.