Honours and Minor Thesis projects

This multidisciplinary project combines cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chinese Studies and Political Science. The project aims to develop a deeper understanding of how official discourse has developed throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China. The main focus will be on text in the People’s Daily, the largest newspaper in China and the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

Neural module networks (NMNs) [1] support explainable question answering over text [2] by parsing a natural-language question into a program. Such a program consists of a number of differentiable neural modules that can be executed on text in a soft way, operating over attention scores. As a result, NMNs learn to jointly program and execute these programs in an end-to-end way.

Politeness plays an important part in facilitating people's daily communication. There have been quite some studies developed to demonstrate that polite communication is beneficial for instructors to build solidarity and rapport with students, which, in turn, facilitate students to learn and gain better performance. However, it remains largely unexplored to what extent instructors and teachers provide polite feedback to students in educational discussion forums.

With the glow of digital information techniques, mobile systems are powerful ever and occupying more market shares. Just like wildly used social media sites, e.g. Facebook and Twitter, smartphone usage is up to 80% by 2020. In parallel to this trend, many companies are trying to incorporate Artificial Intelligent especially deep learning empowered applications into devices to further ease the life of people.

    DNA or RNA motif discovery is a popular biological method to identify over-represented DNA or RNA sequences in next generation sequencing experiments. These motifs represent the binding site of transcription factors or RNA-binding proteins. DNA or RNA binding sites are often variable. However, all motif discovery tools report redundant motifs that poorly represent the biological variability of the same motif, hence renders the identification of the binding protein difficult.

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].

The Optimisation group is looking for multiple students to contribute to our world leading research. Our interests range from practical to theoretical. So whether you are interested in path finding for AI in games, solving a complex scheduling problem, designing new algorithms, or working on our specialised modelling language, we will have a project that is of interest to you!

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.

Are you interested in applying your database knowledge to a real project? This project aims to develop a patient registry for hospitals around Australia. This is a collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine, Monash University. We will be building a central database or a data warehouse repository to store patient admission to the hospitals.

Combating cybercrime and maintaining national security is a global challenge. In light of this the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM) has been deployed in over 80 countries; the objective of the CMM is to understand and evaluate cybersecurity capacity within these national contexts in order to support the “well-being, human rights and prosperity”. The outcome of each deployment is a comprehensive report.