Honours and Minor Thesis projects

Multimedia content such as audio, image, and video are stored and transported in compressed forms. Various standards are designed to encode the content at the highest possible level while minimizing distortion. Some commonly used compression standards include MP3 for audio, JPEG for still image, H.264/AVC for video. Despite the vast differences in signal characteristics, most compression standards have two things in common: transformed-quantized coefficients and scale factor (quantization table in JPEG and AVC). The coefficients are usually coded as a product of sign_bit and magnitude.

Podcasts have become a very popular way for small communities to create content that is meaningful for them and reach a wider audience. However, many of the skills and equipment needed to produce a good podcast are inaccessible to non-professionals and there is often a learning curve attached to gain necessary skills. In addition, the production process is seen as an individual effort (one or two producers working in isolation to produce the final edit).

Radio is one of the primary modes in which communities across the world receive important information and build connection with wider society. Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have long been leveraging radio, and in particular Community Radio

In many parts of the world, audio is the preferred interface for social interactions. There has been a huge push towards audio-based interfaces for engaging marginalised communities in rural and Developing countries contexts.

As part of this project, you will work closely with a community organisation or NGO (this can either be an organisation that you have existing links with or we will connect you with one of our partner NGOs). Working in collaboration with the org, you will find out challenges they face in giving voice to their communities/beneficiaries that can be addressed through social media (for instance, perhaps they want to run an awareness raising campaign about the difficulties faced by the community and they want the communities to be very involved in this).

This project is within the scope of the project “Artificial Intelligence in carDiac arrEst” (AIDE), which was led by Ambulance Victoria (AV) in Australia, involving a team of researchers at Monash University. This AIDE project has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to recognise potential Out-of-Hospital-Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) during the Triple Zero (000) call by using transcripts produced by Microsoft Automatic Speech Recognition service.

Note that this project is available as an undergraduate winter scholarship project

Recently, program generation and optimisation techniques have been adapted to performance critical subroutines in cryptography. Codes generated/optimised by these techniques are both secure and their performance is highly competitive compared to hand-optimised code by experts [1].

IT Forensics is the art of extracting digital pieces of evidence also known as (aka) artifacts in a forensically sound manner, that is presentable to a court of law. In doing this it covers a range of conceptual levels, from high-level operating systems and computer theory down to computer networking. 
 

The specific objective(s) of this project is to look at an encrypted piece of data and distinguish what encryption algorithm is used/employed. This would benefit IT Forensics researchers/investigators attacking encrypted volumes, files, folders, etc.

Since the 1990s, researchers have known that commonly-used public-key cryptosystems (such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman systems) could be potentially broken using efficient algorithms running on a special type of computer based on the principles of quantum mechanics, known as a quantum computer. Due to significant recent advances in quantum computing technology, this threat may become a practical reality in the coming years. To mitigate against this threat, new `quantum-safe’ (a.k.a.

Mini-CP https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pschaus/minicp.html is a minimal form of constraint programming solver, designed to allow for easy experimentation and learning. 

One of the most efficient approaches to discrete optimisation solving is using lazy clause generation, which is a hybrid SAT/CP approach to solving problems.  But MiniCP does not currently support this.