Honours and Masters project

In this project you will work on creating a 3D printed platform used with an iPad for people who are blind or have low vision. The platform will allow people to program in the Scratch visual programming language (https://scratch.mit.edu/) using 3D printed blocks. You will program Arduino boards, print models using 3D printers, and integrate these models with an iPad.

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 `post-quantum’ (a.k.a.

People who are blind or have low vision (BLV) access documents using screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA. These screen readers emulates a cursor moving around the screen using arrow keys or various shortcut combinations. However, this way of interaction is vey slow and not ideal for getting an overview of a document and navigating to relevant sections.

Haptic ring is a wearable device that is used by people who are blind or have low vision. It provides electro-vibration feedback on different locations of users' fingers. Its primary use is to extend the user interaction with touch screens in which haptic feedback is restricted due to battery consumptions. 

In this project you will work on improving the haptic ring by investigating design improvements that will allow the device to provide more accurate feedback. We will provide support for the design and programming components of the project.

It is quite challenging to access to videos for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV), particularly creating audio descriptions that describe the scenes without interfering the dialogues in a video. There is also the challenge of providing additional information using multi-modal feedback, that is using non-speech audio and haptics.

Modern machine learning is increasingly applied to create amazing new technologies and user experiences, many of which involve training machines to learn responsibly from sensitive data, such as personal photos or email. Ideally, the parameters of trained machine-learning models should encode general patterns rather than facts about specific training examples.

Deep learning has achieved ground-breaking performance in many 2D vision tasks in the recent years. With more and more 3D data available such as those captured by Lidar, the next research trend is doing advanced perception on 3D data. The objective of this project is to study the state-of-the-art object detection techniques for 3D point clouds such as PointNet and PointVoxel.

Activity and movement are fundamental diagnostic parameters of animal behaviour. However, measuring long-term individual movement within groups was not possible until recently. Our ActivityMonitor provides accurate individual movement data in a fully automated way. This is a unique solution for the 24/7 long-term tracking of individual animals living in groups, which utilises an array of RFID readers positioned under the home cage of rats and mice that are implanted with RFID transponders.

DeepLabCut™ is an efficient method for 3D markerless pose estimation based on transfer learning with deep neural networks that achieves excellent results across a broad collection of behaviours. This project will utilise the DeepLabCut package to analyse the behaviour of rats and mice as they are trained and tested on reward-based learning tasks designed to examine aspects of attention, memory and impulsive behaviour.

Lipids such as cholesterol or triglycerides are involved in a plethora of medical disorders and diseases ranging from cardiovascular diseases (including obesity and artherosclerosis) to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. An in-depth analysis of individual lipid classes and species is often indispensable to unravel the mechanisms underlying disease onset and progression.