Honours and Minor Thesis projects

Problem Statement: The forensic identification of human remains is a critical legal process, culminating in the issuance of a death certificate by the appropriate authority. It is a multifaceted procedure that integrates scientific evidence—from antemortem records to advanced DNA analysis, forensic odontology, and anthropology—to match unidentified remains with missing persons.

Product teams always need to conduct a user study with real and targeted users once the product is developed to test the usability and potential bugs in the products; however, this process is always time-consuming and costly. The team may need to find people of different backgrounds, train them, and then spend time with the users when they are doing the study. Moreover, they always need to conduct several rounds of usability tests every time they iterate the product based on the feedback from the previous study or because of the new requirements from product managers.

Accessing maps is a very challenging task for people with vision impairment. Particularly, navigating a map using panning and zooming and finding information on the screen. 

Freedom of Information is an important tool for investigating a public authority or organisation. Subject to certain conditions, it creates an obligation to provide recorded information, provided an organisation is a public authority.

I am interested in supervising projects that make use of Freedom of Information as a tool for investigating information management practices within public-sector organisations. For example, this might include information security, policies around information retention, or any other topic that can be investigated using Freedom of Information.

The project aims to estimate heart rate non-intrusively using video data of humans faces. The heart rate estimation from videos finds its usefulness in numerous applications including patient contactless heart-rate monitoring in hospitals and elderly care facilities. The main challenges are associated with the subject's motion and varying lighting conditions. Existing methods mostly devise a multi-stage strategy, where the first stage detects facial region, performs tracking followed by segmentation of skin pixels.

Become part of the Monash Immersive Analytics Lab, and explore exciting new ways to visualise, interact, and analyse all types of data with VR and AR! We are looking for enthusiastic students to work on immersive visualisation using latest technology, such as head-mounted displays with integrated eye-trackers (Microsoft HoloLens and others), gesture recognition devices, and large wall displays.

Mission-critical systems have to comply to various formal standards – e.g. DO-178C and ISO26262 - about their operation, usually heavily relying on formal specification languages such as TLA+. This presents many challenges to developers in terms of how to write, read and communicate the target system’s formal specifications. In most cases, having the right formal methods experts to write specifications does not solve the problem as the wider development team needs to be able to deeply understand the formal specifications.

This project relates to the visualisation of the source of data used in scientific experiments, and their results. The visualisation focus is graphs.

Trust in the results of scientific experiments and scientific modelling relies on knowing how they have been derived – that is, the ‘scientific workflow’ that led to their production. Being able to reproduce the scientific workflow that led to such results is critical in ensuring trust, confidence and transparency [2].

In this project, we will look into how to make the physiological data of VR users visible to externals, e.g., a teacher watching a student learning in VR, or a supervisor watching a worker fulfil a task in VR.

Different studies have shown that fluctuations in cognitive load are expressed through changes in human physiology, such as temperature patterns on the face or pupil dilation. However, in users of VR headsets, the face and eyes are covered by the HMD.

Although we normally use our fingers to manipulate apps in the smart phone, that operation may not apply in some special situation e.g., checking information when holding your kids, driving, people with disability, etc. In those special scenarios, controlling the app with voice will make it much more convenient. In this study, we are trying to develop a tool to automatically map your voice to operations in mobile apps. You will work with one of my PhD students and me to deliver this exciting work which can be both published in academic and applied into the practice.